by Nick Hornby
* * *
—
It was Joseph’s mother who worked out what was going on first, and she did it aloud while Grace was eating with them.
“What happened with that girl?” said Grace.
They were eating his mum’s chicken stew, and Joseph wanted to concentrate on it. He loved it, and he was hungry, and for some reason it had become Grace’s homecoming meal, and she didn’t come home all that often.
“What girl?”
“I thought you’d met someone?”
“Why did you think that?”
“You texted me.”
“Oh.”
Why had he done that? What business was it of hers?
“Yeah. Well. Didn’t come to anything.”
“He’s got other fish to fry,” said his mother.
Joseph felt himself going cold.
“Oooh,” said Grace. “I want the gossip.”
“There isn’t any gossip.”
Grace had been with her boyfriend for three years. Neither of them ever looked at anyone else. They would end up married. She loved gossip.
“Oh, there’s gossip,” said his mother.
Grace looked at him.
“Come on, then,” she said.
“What are you talking about, Mum?”
“Your friend.”
“Which friend? I haven’t got a friend.”
He was trying to sound mystified, but it wasn’t coming out right. He could hear the panic in his voice.
“Well,” said his mother. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Why will you be the judge of whether I’ve got a friend or not?”
“Yeah, Mum,” said Grace. “That makes no sense.”
“All I know is, he spends an awful lot of time with one particular woman.”
“Ooh,” said Grace. “A woman.”
“That’s the thing,” said his mother. “That’s what she is.”
“How do you know anything about what she is?” said Joseph.
“You tell us, then.”
“He doesn’t want to tell me, Mum,” said Grace.
“Thank you,” said Joseph.
“So just gimme what you got.”
“So there’s this woman he keeps babysitting for. And now he’s spending half the night there even when he’s not babysitting.”
“You don’t know where I am when I’m not here.”
“Of course I do. That thing you made me put on my phone.”
Find My Friends. Shit. He’d put it on there to stop her from worrying, and he’d been under the impression that she hadn’t looked at it once.
“How do you know that’s her address?”
“I don’t. But one night when you were babysitting, I had a look to see where she lived. And that’s the place you keep going back to. So it’s either her, or you were lying to me about where you were in the first place.”
He was like a man chased down a blind alley by the police in a film. He had to keep looking for a way out, even though there wasn’t one.
“So I was lying to you. So what?”
“You made up all those names?”
“Only three. Her and the kids.”
“And her job, and her mother having a stroke.”
He had made up the stroke. For a moment he was tempted to tell her that Lucy’s mother was the only true bit.
“So what have you been doing in that street every night?”
“You go there every night?” said Grace.
He did, now. He couldn’t bear not to. He’d be there within thirty minutes of walking out the front door, if the buses were OK.
“Yes,” said Joseph.
“So where is it you’re going, if it’s nothing to do with a woman?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Do you want to start again?” said Grace.
“Yes,” said Joseph.
His back was against the wall; he’d tried to shin up it, but it was too high and there was no grip.
“Go on, then.”
“I’m seeing the woman I babysit for.”
“And why is that so shameful?”
“It isn’t.”
“How old is she?” said his mother.
“I dunno.”
“How old do you think she is?”
“That’s a bit rude.”
“Rude to guess?” said Grace “When she’s not here?”
“Well. If I said sixty-two and she’s thirty-nine . . . I’d feel, I dunno. Disloyal.”
“You think you might be sleeping with a sixty-two-year-old?” said Grace.
“Oh, Joseph,” said his mother, despairingly.
“I don’t think he’s actually sleeping with a sixty-two-year-old,” said Grace. “I think he’s just making up a ridiculous excuse for not telling us. How old are her kids?”
“Ten and eight.”
“Well, she probably didn’t have the youngest when she was fifty-four. She’s probably around forty, right?”
“Maybe.”
“So my age,” said his mother.
Nobody said anything. Grace looked at him, and he could tell she knew that Lucy wouldn’t be his mother’s age, even if they’d been born at the same time on the same day in the same year. They decided, collectively and telepathically, that this was not an observation anyone wanted to articulate.
“White?” said Grace.
“Yeah. And so is Scott, so don’t get on your high horse about that.”
Grace held up her hands in a pacific gesture.
“I was only trying to get a picture.”
“So ask for a picture.”
“Have you got one?”
“No.”
“Is she on Instagram?”
“No.”
“You sure? What’s her name?”
“Listen, you don’t need a picture!” said Joseph. “She’s around forty and she’s attractive and she’s white. What’s your problem?”
“But where’s it going?” said his mother.
“Where’s anything going?” said Joseph.
“You’re not looking for something more permanent?”
“No. I’m twenty-two. I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to have kids.”
“You will one day.”
“Maybe. In ten years.”
“I’ll be dead by then,” said his mother.
“Why will you be dead at the age of fifty-two?”
“Too old to enjoy it, anyway.”
Grace picked up her phone and spoke into it.
“People born in . . . Shit. What year were you born in if you’re fifty-two?”
“Fifty-two now?” said Joseph.
“Yeah.”
“1964.”
“People born in 1964.”
“Here is what I found about famous people born in 1964,” Siri said. “Keanu Reeves. Sandra Bullock. Lenny Kravitz. Michelle Obama.”
“You think Michelle Obama would be too old to enjoy grandchildren?” said Grace.
They were a long way from discussing his relationship with Lucy now. They were talking about famous people a decade older than Lucy (and his mother.)
“Well, she’s got Secret Service people and everything,” said his mother.
“Why would you need Secret Service people to play with your grandchildren?”
“I’m just saying. She has people doing things for her. Less stress.”
“You think if you need Secret Service to protect you, you have less stress in your life? She has Secret Service because a ton of people want to shoot her.”
And now they were talking about whether the Obamas had more or less stress than his mother. Sometimes, when they had real problems to discuss, his famil
y’s inability to stick to the subject at hand frustrated him. But sometimes, like now, he was grateful for it. He had survived the immediate Lucy crisis, but that didn’t mean it was forgotten, or that he knew what to say about it.
* * *
—
On the bus down to Lucy’s, he thought about what he’d said to his mother, a question he’d asked when he didn’t know what else to say, but which stuck with him: Where’s anything going? What if things had gone well with Jaz, and she’d driven Lucy out of his mind and heart and body? Would he have thought, this is going somewhere? It seemed highly unlikely to him. It would have seemed highly unlikely to his mother and Grace too, if they’d met Jaz. And yes, some day he’d probably meet somebody and he might start thinking about some kind of life with her. But the weird thing about being his age was that you spent half your time dreaming about what might happen to you, and the other half trying not to think about it, and either way you were stuck living a life that didn’t seem to count for much, somewhere halfway between childhood and whatever permanent adulthood might bring.
And here was the thing about Lucy: she pulled him into now. He spent his life chasing, running from job to job to job, earning the money that would maybe one day enable him to live away from home. And if that day ever came, he’d have to add a couple of other jobs into the portfolio, and he’d never stop running. The only time he ever spent on anything resembling a dream was the time he spent trying to create a track, which would maybe one day lead to some remix work and a few paid club gigs. If you’d asked him before the Night of No Jazz what made him happy, he wouldn’t really have understood the relevance of the question. Now he knew the answer: sleeping with Lucy, eating with Lucy, watching T.V. with Lucy. And maybe there was no future in it, but there was a present, and that’s what life consists of.
* * *
—
Lucy had hoped that Emma might have forgotten about the drink they talked about, but she texted, and then called and left a message, and then called again. She hinted at some crisis that only Lucy would understand, although as listening wasn’t Emma’s strong suit, Lucy didn’t really know how she’d arrived at that conclusion. They went to a local Italian restaurant with the intention of both eating pasta and drinking while Joseph fed the kids and played on the Xbox. Morale was high when she left the house, but Lucy was already worried about the argument over money that would ensue the moment she got home. She had to pay Joseph, and he would feel uncomfortable to the point of refusal, but she’d have to win. The blurred lines that would then form if she lost frightened her. Joseph couldn’t be her boyfriend; Joseph couldn’t be some kind of stepfather. He was a babysitter that she had sex with. She would pay for the babysitting but not the sex.
“Drink,” said Emma desperately, as soon as they sat down. Lucy smiled indulgently, but the best part of a bottle of red disappeared before they’d ordered, and she was still sipping her first glass.
“Tough day?” said Lucy.
“Not particularly. No worse than any of the others. My friend Sophie is coming, by the way. You remember? She used to be a mum at Wyatt.”
Lucy remembered her straight away: a lithe, tall blonde, always expensively dressed, whose face seemed to suggest that life couldn’t possibly have dealt her a worse hand, but whose life seemed perfectly pleasant from the outside.
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“No. Of course not.”
But if you already have a friend to moan at, Lucy thought, why am I here?
“How it happened was, I told her about your recent developments, and she’s divorced and not having much luck, so she wanted to hear all about it.”
“Right. But I’m not sure I want to talk about my, my personal life to a stranger.”
“So you don’t remember her?”
“I do remember her. But even so . . .”
“Oh, she’s very nice. Her kids go to St. Peter’s with mine now.”
A non sequitur, but Lucy would let it pass.
“It’s not the niceness.”
“We don’t want details. We just want to know how you managed it.”
“Why do you want to know? You’re not divorced.”
“I’m sure I will be soon. And even if I’m not . . .”
She gave Lucy a look intended to convey her readiness for extramarital action.
“Listen, my whatever it is, my relationship . . . There’s nothing to learn from it. It just happened.”
“But how? Ah, here she is.”
Sophie looked different. Perhaps Lucy had been muddling her up with someone.
“She looks great, doesn’t she?” said Emma.
“Really,” said Lucy.
She could now see a trace of the woman she remembered. Everything on her face was glossy and stretched, and though the work looked expensive, it had also turned her into somebody else. Maybe that’s what she wanted. She was also displaying a cleavage that hadn’t been there before. Lucy realized that she didn’t really know anybody like Sophie. Lucy belonged to a tribe where prematurely gray-haired women wouldn’t even dye the gray away, and though these women made her feel both defensive and sad (she would use as much dye as it took, the moment a gray hair appeared) she felt the same way as them about most things that mattered—the importance of books and serious movies, politics, the environment, the referendum. But all sorts of tribes lived in the urban jungle, and just because Lucy never came across people like Sophie, with their four-by-fours and their private schools and their new breasts, it didn’t mean that they weren’t out there, living close by, in streets she never went to.
“What is wrong with people?” said Emma.
Lucy understood that people, in this context, meant the men who were not dating Sophie. Lucy shook her head in sympathetic bafflement.
“Are you still doing that marvelous job?” said Sophie.
“I don’t think my students would agree,” said Lucy.
“She meant that you’re just marvelous for doing it,” said Emma.
“And Emma tells me you’ve been through a fair bit of drama too.”
“Have I?”
“With your husband. Paul, was it?”
“Oh. I don’t know how dramatic it was.”
“Listen to her,” said Emma.
School had helped her to put the calamitous collapse of her marriage into some kind of perspective. There were fifteen hundred kids on the roll, representing a thousand or more families, and she’d been at the school for over a decade. Her story was dramatic compared to the stories of university friends or the middle-class mothers at the primary-school gates, but her students told, or frequently refused to tell, tales of domestic abuse, imprisonment, deportation, poverty, and hunger. You had to do better than drug addiction and divorce to capture their attention. Two of them had been murdered, one while he was a pupil, the other soon after he’d left. Stabbed, both of them. Who knew anyone who’d been murdered? Many teachers in big inner-city schools did. How was one supposed to go home and feel as if one’s world was ending if it wasn’t?
“I’m sorry to hear about your divorce,” said Lucy.
“Best thing that ever happened to me,” said Sophie.
“Oh, good.”
“Look at her,” said Emma, apparently making the point that with no divorce, there’d have been no Botox or breast implants, and then where would she be?
“That was a stupid thing to say,” said Sophie.
“You or me?” said Emma, a little wounded.
“What you said was a bit stupid. But I was talking about me. It was a terrible thing to happen. And I’m more miserable now than I was before, which is saying something.”
“Why were you miserable before?”
“Didn’t like him. Then he met someone else, so I like him even less.”
“That seems logical.”
“Everyone I know is miserable,” said Sophie. “Everyone.”
Lucy could believe it, but the misery would have mystified anyone on the outside of it. It was spring. They were well off. In a couple of months they would be going to France or Spain, for two or three or four weeks. But they were stuck, and they were bored. Sex, and the way they were having it, and who they were having it with, offered some kind of way out, they thought. Their boredom was infuriating, and Lucy began to wonder how she could cease to know them. Surely one of the points of sending one’s children to state secondary school was that you could dump the parents of the kids they used to play with when they were younger.
“Except you, apparently, Lucy,” said Sophie. “That’s why we’re here. We want to know why you’re not miserable.”
“We need a master class.”
“Give us hope.”
“Is this all because I may or may not be having sex?”
“I thought you were,” said Emma.
“And also,” said Sophie, “if you don’t know, who does?”
“I do know,” said Lucy. “I just didn’t want to talk about it in the street, with lots of people listening. And now I don’t want to talk about it here.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Emma. “You’re representing.”
“I just think meeting someone would help me,” said Sophie. “Even if it was nothing serious. Especially if it was nothing serious.”
