by Nick Hornby
“So out won?” said Dylan.
“Yep.”
“Are you angry?”
“I’m a bit sad.”
“I can’t remember whether I was in or out,” said Al.
“You were out,” said Dylan. “I was in.”
“Ha. Loser.”
“I didn’t know you were out,” said Lucy. “Why?”
“Because he was in,” said Al.
“That’s a stupid way to make a political decision,” said Lucy, before remembering that she had voted in exactly the same way. Perhaps that’s how everyone had done it, in the end.
* * *
—
Very few of the P.E. teachers turned up in the staffroom before the first lesson. They were usually in the gym, or on the all-weather pitch, putting out equipment and messing around with a ball. But as Lucy was making a coffee, the door burst open, and Sam came in singing “Championes, championes, olé olé olé.”
One or two people smiled at his ebullience; most glowered at him. He made his way over to Polly, who was scrolling through her phone, and sat down next to her.
“Unlucky,” he said.
“Fuck off.”
“I knew you’d be a sore loser.”
“It’s not a game.”
“I never said it was. But your side lost.”
“Yes, and I’m sad, so why rub my nose in it? You can do that after a football match, but not when you’ve fucked the country up.”
“But we don’t think we have.”
“What do you think you’ve done then?”
“We’ve told the E.U. where to stick their laws.”
“You mean, ‘Now we can kick immigrants out’?”
“Oh, here we go. Everyone’s a racist except you.”
Ben Davies, the deputy head, walked over to Sam, bent over, and said something quietly into his ear.
“Me?” said Sam, at an entirely different volume. “Why not her? She’s told me to fuck off, and she’s told me I’ve fucked the country up. Why can’t she go somewhere else?”
Ben continued to say things that nobody else could hear, and eventually Sam stood up and walked out.
Lucy had been a teacher for a long time, and she had seen arguments between members of staff before, but they were about cover periods and difficult pupils—about work, in other words. These rows blew over. Understandings were reached. Jokes were made. But this was about whether Polly or Sam was a bad person. Neither of them was, of course, but it would be a while before they would be able to see it like that. How long? Who knew? And knowledge seemed beside the point anyway.
* * *
—
After school she got a text from Fiona, the college friend who had introduced her to Michael, on the night that Joseph had pushed Paul into the hedge. We’re trying to cheer ourselves up with drinks and nibbles tomorrow night. A chance for a moan and a catch-up. Please come. That was exactly what Lucy wanted: a moan. She wanted to listen to people like her say things that she hadn’t thought about, and she wanted to let off steam. She had presumed that Saturday night was going to be a takeaway, two episodes of The Sopranos, and some escapist sex. But she needed to talk, and she could see that Joseph might not be the right person to talk to.
Do you still do babysitting? she texted.
For the right person.
Proper. Payment etc.
OK. What time?
She had hoped for a joke about payment in kind, but then, she hadn’t made one either.
Eight?
Maybe I’ll come straight after work and play with boys.
Sure.
You don’t have to pay for that part.
Worth any money. See you later?
Going to a party.
Oh. OK, she typed, and then deleted the oh, which sounded wounded to her, and, now she came to think about it, was meant to sound that way to him.
OK.
xx
She doubted that they’d ever go below two kisses, as long as communication continued. Could a bubble be in the process of popping? It couldn’t, really. It just popped.
* * *
—
Joseph was babysitting the twins the following Tuesday, five days after the referendum, and as he was leaving, Marina asked for a quick word.
“Listen,” she said. “I know you do lots of other jobs, and you’ve got lots of other sources of income . . .”
“Yeah,” said Joseph. “The money’s pouring in.”
“Oh, please don’t say that,” Marina said.
She was a nice woman. He had absolutely nothing to say to her that wasn’t about her children, but she trusted him, and treated him like a grown-up. He’d never met Oliver, her husband. He was never home by six, when Joseph knocked off.
“I was kidding.”
“I know, but . . . We’re almost certainly going to have to move.”
“Oh. Right. Where? Because maybe . . .”
“Abroad. Oliver works for a Japanese company, and if we’re not in Europe, London isn’t going to be any use to them. They’re thinking of getting out quick and going to Paris or Brussels. They want him to open the office there.”
“Oh.”
“This whole thing is a walking fucking nightmare.”
Joseph had no plans to go and live in Brussels or Paris, but neither option sounded like a walking fucking nightmare to him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Your generation must feel so betrayed. All these old farts gambling your future away.”
“Yeah,” he said. He was glad he’d voted for both sides. It made these conversations easier. But maybe when he’d shrugged it all off, on the grounds that there would always be meat, and football, and kids, he’d been too optimistic: there wouldn’t always be kids. Not these kids, anyway. There would always be meat, though, and football, and leisure centers. Maybe there would be more leisure than anyone knew what to do with.
9
The Friday-night party was in a place called God’s Village, owned by some church in Tottenham. It was a maze of halls, chapels, conference rooms, and corridors, all of them devoted to Our Lord on every day of the week apart from this one, when it was devoted to loud music, Yeezys, and discarded cans of NOS. It took Joseph a while to find Jaz and Darcy. They were in the corner of the main room, away from the speakers, in the center of a little knot of people, mostly guys. As Joseph approached, he realized he knew most of them from school, or from football, or from being in the same place at the same time. He hadn’t seen them for years. Who had moved on? It didn’t feel like he had.
“Nobody dancing?” he said, as a way of stopping the girls from saying something mean, or aggressive, or flirtatious, or sexually explicit.
The boys, Cody, Josh L., Xavier, a couple of others he only halfrecognized, offered fists and leaned in for a quick hug. It felt good to be exchanging greetings with people he knew and understood. It felt good to understand the greetings, even.
“We’re waiting,” said Jaz. “This guy called PoundMan is D.J.-ing.”
“I know PoundMan.”
“Someone said he was American.”
Joseph didn’t ask her why an American would fly over the Atlantic and make his way to Tottenham to play at Alexa Williams’s twenty-first birthday party and be called £Man..
“Nope. North London.”
He wouldn’t tell anyone that £Man was Zech. Some of them might remember him, especially if Joseph were unkind enough to describe his physical peculiarities and inadequacies. If Jaz thought £Man was American, then maybe the transitioning was working, even though Zech still had to get behind the decks and reveal himself at some point in the evening.
“How you been, anyway?” he said to Josh.
“Yeah, OK.”
“You working?”
“Last year of college.”
“Where?”
“South Bank. Game Design and Development.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it as good as it sounds?”
“It’s sick. And I’ve been offered a job when I leave.”
For some reason, Joseph had got it into his head that he’d be listening to stories about unemployment and supermarket jobs, and he’d feel good about himself. Now he remembered that he wasn’t actually doing that well, and that a lot of his self-esteem came from the sense of direction Lucy seemed to give him. Talking to Josh made him realize that Lucy wasn’t a job, as such. She seemed to offer him a way out of something. It just wasn’t a way out of any of the jobs he was doing.
“How about you, man?” said Josh.
“Yeah. Busy.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.” He felt he should give a fuller picture of his activities, without going into any specifics. “I just wanted to get on with it, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Make myself a few quid.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m paying off student debt for years to come.”
“That’s it, you see? I don’t have to worry about any of that.”
He hadn’t thought of it like that. He was actually rich, compared to some of them, simply because there wasn’t a minus number in his bank account. He had plus five hundred or so, whereas Josh had minus forty or fifty thousand.
“And are you living at home?” Josh asked.
“For now, yeah. Looking around at the moment.”
As he said the words, something compelled him to scan the room, presumably so that he could not be found guilty of lying in a court of law. He was literally looking around at that precise moment. There was unlikely to be any kind of legal situation, true, but the conversation was pulling him into uncomfortable areas. If there was an opportunity for the truth, he wanted to take it.
“Seen anyone you like?” said Josh.
Joseph had been looking around the party, not for girls, but to illustrate the hunt for new accommodation. That explanation was complicated, however, maybe even insane.
“There are some very, very pretty women here,” said Joseph. Now he needed to find some examples urgently, just in case Josh asked for some.
“If you had to go home with one, who would it be?”
“That one over there,” said Joseph. He hadn’t spotted anyone. He would point in the general direction, and hope that someone over there vaguely corresponded to somebody’s idea of a one-night stand or a potential wife, depending on which sort of going home Josh meant. Were mothers and cakes involved? Or just beds and condoms?
“Hanna Johnson?”
Probably, Joseph thought. She’d do as well as anyone.
“Yeah.”
“Do you know her?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Come on. Let’s go and talk to her.”
Oh, hell. Why had he said he was looking around for somewhere to live? It was a pathetic lie, and as a consequence he was going to end up having sex or a relationship or an entire life with someone he didn’t know and who wasn’t his type anyway.
* * *
—
Anyway, it turned out that Hanna was exactly his type, a type he didn’t even know he was interested in. She was pretty, quiet, smart, and the smartness didn’t just come from the glasses she wore. Or rather, he didn’t come to the conclusion that she was smart just because she wore glasses. (The glasses might well have been because of the smartness. Maybe she read so much that her eyes became strained.) She was at the university too, studying English at U.C.L. He’d never met anyone who had studied there. Later, he wondered whether Lucy had created the interest—whether he was suddenly interested in people who knew about books because of her. He asked questions, listened, didn’t mention the butcher’s or the leisure center (or Lucy) and to his surprise asked her out for a drink. The immediate trouble this caused came from Jaz, who seemed to know about it even before it had been planned, and who said unkind things about Hanna and about him to his face, and who before the evening was over said unkind things about him to Hanna’s face.
Oh, and £Man blew the roof off.
* * *
—
The queue at the shop on Saturday morning was different—louder, more animated. People were speaking to those behind them and in front of them, and the conversations continued into the shop. It slowed everything down: sentences had to be finished and points made before orders were given. If Joseph had never worked in the shop before, he’d have presumed that some kind of coach party had just arrived, people who for reasons best known to themselves had come from a small village out of town to buy meat. Since the previous Saturday, the country had voted out and the Prime Minister had gone, and that was enough to turn the Saturday-morning volume button up. Lucy was in the coach party. He saw her through the window, talking over her shoulder to the man behind her, and when she got into the shop, Joseph tried to focus on what she was saying, as opposed to what everyone else was saying.
“I don’t get it. How will a petition help, when we’ve just had a vote?”
She smiled at Joseph, and he smiled back.
“Eight hundred thousand signatures this morning.”
“But how many people voted out? Seventeen million?”
“Something like that.”
“So I’ll put my name to it when it gets to seventeen million.”
“If everyone thought like you, we wouldn’t get anywhere.”
“Most people do think like me. That’s why you’ve only got eight hundred thousand signatures.”
“In twenty-four hours.”
“Hi. Could I have four rump steaks, please?”
Lucy was being served, by Cass. Joseph wondered whether he was getting the fourth steak.
“So you’re just going to do nothing?”
“Oh, I’ll probably moan a lot.”
“Good morning.”
Joseph was looking after the guy, which nowadays he preferred. He’d only served Lucy once since they’d started sleeping together, and it felt weird, both of them on the verge of laughing all the time. It felt like he was wearing an “I Fucked Lucy” hat.
“What would you like?”
“Can I have twelve of the gluten-free sausages?”
“That’s twenty pounds forty,” said Cass.
“I want some cubed lamb as well, please. People voted a different way from me. What else is there to say? Apart from I wish they hadn’t?”
“It’ll be a bloody disaster, though. It’s insane.”
“Anything else?”
“I’d like some of those marinated chicken skewers. Six? Yes. Six.”
“Barbecue this evening?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, I think. If the weather holds.”
Joseph wondered whether the man would ask him to sign this petition. He thought not. The queue was made up of one type of person. The people behind the counter, apart from Cass the university student, were another.
“Have you signed it?” the man said to Cass. Wow, thought Joseph. Wow.
Actually, Joseph was glad he hadn’t been asked. What would the man who voted both ways say? Yes and no, probably.
“Yeah,” said Cass. “Of course. But I don’t know why I bothered.”
What was it? Her accent? Her eyebrows? The little tattoo on her hand? In lots of ways, Joseph thought, he had just as much in common with the petition guy as the petition guy had with Cass. He’d talked about football with him before, during the last World Cup, and he had a kid who played in the league where Joseph coached. But something in Cass had encouraged Petition Guy to believe that in this matter at least, he thought like her. And he was right. Did Joseph mind? He did, he thought. He hadn’t been in
vited by people he didn’t like much to a party he didn’t want to go to. The lack of invitation still stung.
* * *
—
In the Uber on the way to the party at Fiona’s, Lucy felt a pang she didn’t know what to do with. It was like flicking through a photograph album, or the last day of a wonderful holiday, or the occasional moment of motherhood when a child does something that you know won’t happen again, not like that, and you want to stop time. Or this: it was like moving, leaving a house where you’d been happy. Yes, it was her house, and yes, she’d be back in a couple of hours, but the Uber that took her home would be delivering her to a new place. Her house had been happy, and then really fucking miserable, and then, just recently, with Joseph, happy again. But she could tell that the Joseph days were coming to an end. He’d be there when she got back, because he was babysitting. There was even a possibility that they would have sex. But it was all ebbing away, sweetly, sadly, and the sadness was appropriate and inevitable, the end of a movie.
* * *
—
They hadn’t even said anything. Joseph had come round after work, and she’d grilled steaks on the barbecue, lit an hour before he finished work so that she could eat with them before the party, and she’d left him playing FIFA with the boys. So it wasn’t conversation, or a decision. It was all body language, and missed cues, and a slightly stiff politeness that had never been there before. Where had it come from? It was something to do with the events of the week, she knew that much. Last night he had wanted to be with people who wouldn’t talk about them. Tonight she wanted to be with people who would. They weren’t divided in the same way as the rest of the country, she didn’t think. But they were divided nevertheless.
* * *
—
And when she got to the party, she realized that she’d simply missed going out; there had been an awful lot of staying in. It had felt as though home and kids and Joseph had been providing all the necessary nutrients, but of course that wasn’t true. It hadn’t been a healthy diet. Even if she went to the cinema on her own, which she did occasionally, she was sitting with people who liked the films she liked. Sometimes you needed that.
