by Nick Hornby
“You just need a good seeing-to, don’t you, sweetheart?”
Lucy felt sick. These people and their dismal euphemisms, from which all trace of eroticism had been surgically removed, got her down. They were surely more properly applied to another area of human activity completely, boxing, say, or horse riding.
“Have you tried online dating?” said Lucy.
“Yes,” said Sophie. “Three times. With three different people. I couldn’t give it away.”
Lucy tried not to think about what this could possibly mean, although she was sure the new cleavage would have been wheeled into the front line early in the skirmish. It might have been too big a weapon, too soon, resulting in an unhelpful retreat.
“Is that what you did, the online thing?”
“No. There was a blind date that was no good, and then I met someone at a dinner party, but that didn’t go anywhere, and then . . . Well, I met someone else.”
“How?”
“I suppose you could call him a family friend. But really. That’s all I want to say. And it’s not going anywhere. We’re just . . . keeping each other company until something else happens.”
“That’s what I want! Exactly that!”
It might be what you want, Lucy thought, but it isn’t what you need. You need books, music, maybe God. But some guy in between wives isn’t going to do much for you.
* * *
—
“How was your evening?” said Joseph.
She hadn’t managed to miss bedtime, but they’d asked for Joseph to put them to bed anyway. He had developed a range of voices for a series of comic novels they were reading at bedtime, and Lucy’s attempts to recreate them had been met with scorn.
“Soooo bad,” said Lucy. “Emma brought a friend, and they just moaned the whole evening.”
“I hate that.”
“Have you got moany friends?”
“No. But my dad used to be terrible.”
“And he isn’t any more?”
“I don’t know how long it will last. But he’s got involved in the referendum campaign. He’s buzzing.”
“Good for him.”
“Yeah, but he’s voting out.”
“What? Why?”
“He says his money’s going to go up. Supply and demand.”
“He works in the building trade, doesn’t he?”
“Every now and again. Scaffolding. He wants all the Eastern Europeans to go home so they’ll have to pay the British boys more.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“No? How does it work, then?”
He wasn’t being pugnaciously rhetorical. He was looking at her for answers. She was older than him. She was a teacher. She knew stuff.
“Well. If we leave the E.U. there will probably be a recession.”
“Right. And that will be different from austerity?”
“Extra misery, I suppose.”
“OK. Why will we have a recession?”
“Because . . . Well. We have access to five hundred million people. That’s our internal market. Foreign businesses will start to avoid the U.K. because we won’t have that access any more.”
“Why will that mean there’s no building work?”
“There won’t be no building work, obviously. There’ll just be less.”
You could ask her anything you wanted to know about Hardy’s poems and Shakespeare’s tragedies, and she’d be able to answer. Ask her two consecutive questions about the economic consequences of Brexit, however, and she could feel her face start to flush. What did she know about recessions and the building trade and scaffolding?
“So that’s why you’re voting to stay in?”
“I think it’s safer, on the whole. And I’d like the boys to be able to work in Europe, or study at European universities, if that’s what they want. Plus I feel European, you know?”
This was beginning to sound a bit feeble. Joseph’s dad was unlikely to care very much about preserving her sons’ foreign academic opportunities if he could earn more every week.
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do. Don’t you?”
“I’ve never been there. Well. We went to Paris for a day on a school trip. I didn’t feel any more European on the way home.”
“You are European.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m not really, am I? I’m British. Why do I have to be anything else?”
“Do you like being British?”
“It’s not about whether I like it or not. I just am.”
Lucy knew exactly what he meant. She didn’t really feel European. She read British and American newspapers and novels, listened to American and British music, watched British and American T.V. programs, and movies from all over the world. She loved Italian food, but ate Chinese and Indian too—like all British people. She liked going to Europe on holiday, but she went because the sunshine was plentiful and only a couple of hours away. If she could get to Bondi Beach in an afternoon and it cost her a hundred pounds to get there, would she tell Joseph she felt Australian?
“Well,” she said. “I still think your dad’s making a mistake.”
“Tell him that.”
“I will if you want.”
She didn’t mean it. She preferred knowing what she was talking about.
7
So Emma or maybe Sophie told someone who told someone who played five-a-side with Paul on a Thursday night, and the person who played five-a-side asked Paul whether it was weird, knowing that his ex was dating. This person wasn’t being cruel. He had recently separated from his own wife, and was dreading the day that he’d knock on the door of his former home and find a strange man opening it. Paul played from seven until eight. He texted Lucy at ten past, and would have been round five minutes later if she hadn’t put him off. She wanted to be on her own when he came, which meant putting the boys to bed and texting Joseph.
“Is it true?” said Paul.
He hadn’t had a drink since the night of the altercation. She badly wanted a glass of wine, but she put the kettle on. Paul went to the cupboard to get a glass and then to the fridge to get some orange juice. His entitlement annoyed her.
“It depends what you’ve been told.”
“I was just told you had a boyfriend.”
“No, that’s not true.”
“So what is true?”
“That’s a hard question to answer.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Is there some kind of bloke in your life?”
“Some kind of bloke?”
“You know what I mean.”
“There’s something casual going on, yes.”
“Involving sex?”
Surely that was all a casual relationship involved? It was the absence of everything else that provided the informality.
“Yes.”
Paul took a deep breath. She could almost smell the need for something that would take the edge off the moment. His various addictions were sweating from the exertion of jumping up and down while trying to catch the attention of their owner.
“Fucking hell.”
“It was going to happen one day.”
It was like the death of a parent, Lucy thought. It was always coming soon. She just couldn’t believe that it was happening now.
“I’d hoped it wouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“So is that it? I mean, for us?”
What was the kindest answer? No element of her relationship with Joseph was an obstruction to her reconciliation with Paul, but there would be no reconciliation with Paul.
“It’s nothing to do with that.”
“Is it anyone I know?”
“It’s not a friend of yours, if that’s what you mean.”
She could see how Bill Clinton had got himself into such a mess. It depends on what the meaning of the word “know” is. The kids knew him, but they didn’t know him as their mother’s lover. Surely that’s what Paul was asking? Whether they knew their mother’s lover? She could formulate an answer based on the idea of two Josephs, one of whom, Babysitter Joseph, they were close to while never having met Sexual Partner Joseph.
“Kind of.”
“What does that mean?”
In order to answer that question truthfully, she’d have to introduce the notion of the two Josephs, an idea that Paul was likely to find unpersuasive.
“Yeah, they know him.”
“Ah, then this concerns me. If you’re playing happy families with someone I haven’t approved, that’s not right.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works. I live with the boys, and I have an independent life. I can’t be asking for your approval every time I . . .”
This was going wrong too. Her chief objection seemed to be that this would turn into an administrative nightmare, with Paul sat behind a desk with a rubber stamp while a queue of prospective partners snaked out of the door.
“You have to trust me. I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s what every divorced mother says. And the next thing they know, their kids are being hacked into pieces and buried under the floorboards.”
“Jesus Christ, Paul. If that happens, you have my full permission to say ‘I told you so.’”
“It’s not fucking funny.”
“Also, who was the one who turned up drunk and tried to start a fight? Not my boyfriend.”
“You said you didn’t have a boyfriend.”
She had said that, and she’d meant it. Joseph was not her boyfriend. But Joseph had stopped him from coming into the house that night. “Not my boyfriend” meant “my ex-husband, that’s who.” But the person who was not her boyfriend had pushed Paul over, and now Joseph was in this conversation.
“I don’t. I was comparing my calm, peaceful, and sober boyfriend of the future to the man who tried to throw his weight around.”
“Is that guy still babysitting?”
“Joseph? Yes.”
“So presumably he knows who you’re sleeping with.”
“Does that matter to you?”
“Just seems like everyone knows except me.”
“Nobody knows apart from me and the person concerned.”
“And Joseph.”
Her heart was thumping in her chest now. If she didn’t tell the truth, then more or less everything she said from this point onward would be a lie.
“It is Joseph.”
“What is?”
“The person concerned.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“You came round to ask me about who I was . . . seeing. I’m seeing Joseph.”
“That kid?”
“He’s a young man.”
“What’s the age gap?”
“I don’t think that’s anything you need to know. Apart from that he’s really brilliant with the boys, and they love him.”
“Thanks.”
“The more people around them they care about, the better it is for everybody.”
“And all the other gaps? Friends? Culture? Education? Work?”
“We have different friends and different jobs, yes. And what do you know about his education?”
There was an awkward silence, while Paul contemplated the possibility that he’d made an unfortunate assumption, and Lucy tried to work out whether a joke about anything at this point would backfire. It was bound to. She let Paul stew instead.
“No,” said Paul. “You’re right, I don’t. But you know what I’m talking about.”
“You and I had a lot of things in common,” said Lucy. “It’s not necessarily the best indicator.”
She remembered telling Emma that she wanted someone clean, because a lack of hygiene meant that nothing else counted. Sobriety, she realized, was just as important. She might even have been thinking about sobriety all the time. Clean was another word for sober, after all. You could have the same taste in everything, have the same number of qualifications, share the same sense of humor and the same politics, but a vicious dependency would cut through it all and you were left with a thousand pieces of thread that nobody could knit together again.
* * *
—
Joseph came round as soon as Paul had gone.
“I told him,” said Lucy.
“What? Wow.”
“I’m sorry. If that’s exactly what you didn’t want.”
“You told him it was me?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He pointed out all the reasons it wouldn’t work.”
“Right. I don’t want to know what they are.”
He went to the fridge, got out the orange juice, helped himself to a glass from the cupboard.
“I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“We know all that anyway.”
“Yeah.”
She tried to mimic his matter-of-fact tone, but there was a little pang, no doubt about it. Something else like the death of a parent. She knew it was coming soon, but not today, not yet.
* * *
—
Joseph had been putting aside his babysitting money, and he’d bought himself the Ableton Live 10. He’d managed to get the track he’d already half created off the old cracked software and into the new version. It took an entire evening, because he had to bounce every single track to audio first. He’d found a good drum plug-in, a free one, and he wasn’t so worried about not knowing what was out there in the clubs because he was going for something that had a more retro feel, a sort of old-school deep-house thing. He’d started off with what he’d hoped was a sort of lush Latin groove, with synth strings, but it wasn’t until he double-timed the beat that he was happy with it. He had this trumpet sample that he used sparingly until the last minute or so, and then he let it rip for the climax. He’d found the trumpet on one of his mum’s Earth, Wind & Fire records, although his mum didn’t remember it, and she said it must have belonged to his uncle. He’d had to lift some of the music too, but he’d managed to integrate it into the song without bending it out of shape.
He took his laptop to his friend Zech’s house. Zech was changing his name, slowly, to £Man. It was so slow that Joseph described it as “transitioning,” which really pissed Zech/£Man off. Everyone forgot that he was changing his name, on top of which, he was still at college doing a music tech course at B.M.M., and his old name was on all the computers and registers. He refused to answer if anyone called him Zech at college, but it annoyed the other students because it slowed everything up, what with him just sitting there fuming. Joseph wondered how Earl Sweatshirt and A$AP Rocky and ?uestlove and all the others managed it. You never thought of stuff like that when you were starting out.
You were allowed to say PoundMan but you weren’t allowed to write it. You had to use the symbol. Zech was very fierce about that. The truth was, nobody had any cause to write it much. He had made Joseph put £Man into his phone, which did push him up the contacts list, but Joseph had to remember to look under M. For some reason the pound sign didn’t count as a letter. Joseph had to admit that it was a good name, though. Americans used the dollar sign to look flash, but PoundMan sounded cheap, like Poundland. Zech meant it to sound cheap too. It was, he said, a celebration of Haringey consumer culture.
But he was a genius, and one day everyone would know it. He was a walking encyclopedia of black music. He knew about Duke Ellington and he knew about Octavian, and the tracks he was putting together were insane. He already had a deal, but nobody at his label knew what to do with him, because he was five feet
tall, more or less, wore glasses with a very thick lens, breathed through his mouth because of a sinus problem, and bought all his clothes from charity shops. There was stuff up on SoundCloud, but nothing with more than five hundred listens. He’d never had any kind of crew at school, which was where Joseph had met him. He’d kept himself to himself, managed to keep out of the way of people who wished to do him harm, gone home and listened to everything ever made.
£Man found a cable buried deep in the middle of the electronic equipment all over his bedroom floor and plugged the laptop into the studio monitors he’d put together from parts.
“OK.”
“Before we start . . .”
“Oh, here we go,” said £Man. “I don’t want any excuses.”
“No, no excuses. I just don’t know whether it’s finished.”
“So don’t bring it round here, then.”
“What, because you’re so busy in the evenings?”
“Shut up and play it.”
Joseph regretted teasing him about his social life. His sharp ears would be honed to a spiky point, ready to puncture all Joseph’s self-esteem.
“How’ve you been, anyway?”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“What?”
“You take the piss, then you realize I’m about to listen to your track, then you try to make small talk. I’m not an idiot.”
“OK. Sorry. But listen—you’re a genius. This is something different. I’m trying to make dance music, not reinvent the wheel. I’m not in your league.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” And then, grudgingly, “Cheers.”
Joseph felt that he’d warmed him up as much as he was ever going to, pressed play, and tried and failed not to watch £Man’s face. There was nothing on it, though. He just listened, head still, eyes narrowed a little. About halfway through, he leaned over and pressed stop.
“It hasn’t finished.”
“I know.”
“The best part is at the end.”
“Don’t tell me. You’re going to hit us with more of the Earth, Wind & Fire trumpet solo.”
Fuck. Not only did £Man know the track (of course), but he’d guessed how it was going to be used.
