Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

  “Jaz?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She sat down on the arm of a chair and looked at him. He tried to hold her look.

  “And now?”

  He wasn’t expecting that question. He thought now took care of itself, but apparently it didn’t.

  “Now what?”

  “Are you with Jaz now? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  He’d clearly forgotten that Lucy liked to ask direct questions.

  “Does it matter what I say?”

  “Of course.”

  “So you’d just, you know, forget about it?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. But there’s not much point in me deciding to forget it if you’re off anyway.”

  “I’m not off.”

  “OK.”

  For one blissful moment he thought that might be it—that in Lucy’s world, people said “OK” and everything went back to how it had been, but he had veered too far in the other direction. Things weren’t bad simple, and they weren’t good simple.

  “I think you should go home now.”

  He didn’t try to argue, and he hadn’t got an argument anyway.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy didn’t know when she would go back to Joseph’s shop, but she wasn’t buying her meat there at the moment. She went to the supermarket, in the car. So this was why local shops were neglected by local people, despite all protestations to the contrary: local people slept with the people who worked in them, and were then too embarrassed to go back when it all went wrong. She hadn’t slept with anybody in Sainsbury’s, and from what she’d seen so far, she didn’t think she would. She used the girl down the road for babysitting, once when she went to the cinema, once when she went to a staff member’s birthday drinks in the Three Crowns round the corner from school.

  She was hurt but not bitter, sad but not angry. She felt foolish, above all. She’d entered into a steady relationship with a young man in his early twenties. What did young men do? They slept with other people. That’s why nobody got married when they were twenty-three: they weren’t done yet. Of course, it sometimes turned out that people weren’t done at thirty-three, forty-three, or eighty-three, even though they thought they were, but the point is that they thought they were, and life—addictions, new people, whatever—got in the way. She’d known she wouldn’t end up with Joseph because he wasn’t done yet. So if she’d known that, why had she put any weight on him? He was a wonky table, a glass skylight, thin ice. But people enjoyed thin ice! They liked looking at it, or skimming stones across it, or cracking it! They just tried to avoid walking on it, when they knew it was thin (which Lucy had). So was there a way of skimming stones across Joseph, metaphorically? Or chucking stones on him, just for fun, with no chance of causing damage? Even though she wanted to a bit? She had no idea.

  * * *

  —

  He texted her most days, and she replied, but the conversations were brief, terse, polite. And then he called and asked her out to dinner.

  “Just to talk,” he said.

  “As opposed to . . .?”

  “Yes. Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Anyway. I’d like to.”

  “I’ll book somewhere.”

  “OK.”

  “Will I need to do that?”

  “If you’re taking me to the Ivy, yes. If you’re taking me to Pizza Express, no.”

  “Is the Ivy very expensive? And where is it?”

  “I don’t want to go to the Ivy.”

  She’d never been to the Ivy, but she knew about it. Was that the difference between them? Neither of them could afford it, and neither of them would have been able to get a table, but she was aware of the reputation and the impossibility. It didn’t seem worth a lot.

  “Anyway, I don’t want you to pay.”

  “I asked you.”

  “Yes, but that’s enough.”

  They went to an Italian restaurant not far from where she lived, somewhere she’d been with Paul and the boys. Joseph was sitting there waiting for her when she arrived, and he was wearing a suit and a white T-shirt. The obvious effort brought a lump to her throat.

  “I didn’t even know you had a suit,” she said.

  “Yeah. Weddings and funerals, you know. Lot of them in our family.”

  “Well, you look very nice.”

  “Thank you. So do you.”

  She was wearing jeans, a jumper, no makeup. She had thought about what she wanted to say, and what she wanted to say, it turned out, was that she didn’t want him thinking the evening was any kind of a big deal. Now she felt a little foolish, and a little cruel, in a way that she hadn’t intended to be.

  “This isn’t how I feel,” she said.

  He looked puzzled.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Forget it.”

  They ordered drinks, and then looked at their menus.

  “Have anything you want,” said Joseph.

  “I told you, we’re going halves.”

  But she remembered what it had been like, when she was a young teacher on an evening out with friends who were being paid more—the anxiety while they wondered whether they wanted starters, the panic when the wine started disappearing faster and faster. She ached for Joseph a little, and wondered whether that anxiety would ever disappear for him.

  “How’s the music?”

  “I haven’t been with Jaz again, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She laughed.

  “No. I really did want to know about the music.”

  And he told her that he had nearly finished another track, but £Man had asked to hear what he was up to and hadn’t liked it much, and he’d lost confidence, and he didn’t know how to replace Jaz anyway. And then they talked about her work and the boys. They knew a lot about each other. There were a lot of questions to be asked.

  “I’d like to see the kids soon,” said Joseph. “I miss them.”

  “They miss you too.”

  But Joseph, she had decided, would be their last ex. If there was anyone else, he would have to be either permanent or secret. She couldn’t keep introducing the boys to someone they liked and then withdrawing them suddenly. She didn’t envisage a whole string of young men who enjoyed playing FIFA on the Xbox, but there might, at some stage, be someone who could offer wise advice, or help with maths homework. On the other hand, they were unlikely to become deeply emotionally attached to someone who was a whiz with fractions. (She wasn’t sure that she’d be ripping his boxers off with her teeth, either, if that were his main hobby or interest.) Anyway, the subject was confusing, and needed more careful consideration than she had given it to date.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I just said we weren’t seeing each other at the moment, and you’d gone to live with your mum.”

  “Did they understand?”

  “They understand that people split up.”

  “But you didn’t tell them about why?”

  “No. I just said we weren’t getting on. And they said that wasn’t true. And I said there was a lot they didn’t see. And they said that wasn’t true either. I’ll give them the first one.”

  “We were getting on,” said Joseph.

  Lucy didn’t say anything.

  “Weren’t we?”

  “What do you want me to say? Yes. We were getting on. Apart from our little spat about Trump.”

  “That would have blown over.”

  “If what?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your use of the second conditional presupposes an ‘if.’”

  He sighed.

  “You said ‘would.’ It would have blown over. If what?”

  “Well
. If I hadn’t slept with someone else, I suppose.”

  “I think you were always going to sleep with someone else.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You did.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  There were no buts, so he stopped searching for one.

  “Did you think what it would be like for you if I slept with someone else?” she said.

  “Yes. ’Course. Except . . . well, more afterward than before. I’d have hated it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK. It would happen again.”

  “No.”

  “Of course it would.”

  He shook his head, but he couldn’t know for sure.

  It was a time when everyone was vowing never to forgive people. Politicians were never going to be forgiven for what they had done, friends and family were never going to be forgiven for the way they had voted, for what they had said, maybe even for what they thought. Most of the time, people were not being forgiven for being themselves. Politicians who had lied every day of their professional lives were not forgiven for lying. People who lived in cities were not forgiven for being metropolitan, people who were poor were not forgiven for expressing dissatisfaction, old people were not forgiven for being old and scared. But was that all there was to them? And could you only love someone who thought the same way as you, or were there other bridges to be built farther up the river? Could you just tunnel under the whole mess, even? She hadn’t ever been able to forgive Paul for what he had done to her and the children. Now she had to decide whether she could forgive a young man for being a young man, and if she decided she could, would she be able to follow through with it? Deciding to forgive, after all, was not the same thing as forgiveness.

  “How is your mum?” said Lucy. She wanted to talk about something else.

  Spring 2019

  18

  Joseph had been asked to take his father suit shopping, and, if he had decoded his sister correctly, suit shopping meant he had been asked to buy Chris a suit. Brexit hadn’t worked out for him financially, not because there was no work for scaffolders—there was plenty—and not because wages had fallen—they had risen, just as Chris had predicted they would. There was a shortage of every kind of skilled worker in the construction industry, and the referendum had made it worse. But Chris was so angry about Brexit not happening that he had set work aside while he tried to put things right. Joseph wasn’t sure what that meant, and didn’t ask.

  “Thanks for this, son,” he said when they had chosen a dark gray suit from Fashion Man in Wood Green for eighty quid.

  “Fine,” said Joseph.

  He had indeed decoded his sister correctly. They took the suit to the cash desk. The trousers would need taking up, but surely Chris could manage that.

  “It’s quite a cheap one, though,” Chris said. “If I were buying, I’d have probably spent a bit more. Haven’t you just had a promotion?”

  Joseph had been assistant manager at the leisure center for a couple of months. He had given up working at the butcher’s, and even though he still messed around with music, he no longer thought of it as a professional career.

  “Yeah, and I worked hard for it.”

  “Cheaper in the long run, a good suit.”

  True, this was the sort of advice a father was supposed to offer a son, but it wasn’t usually offered in this set of circumstances.

  “Well, everything’s cheaper for you, isn’t it?”

  “You know I’d pay if I could.”

  “You could have paid,” said Joseph. He should have been bigger than that, but he wasn’t.

  “How?”

  “You could have taken some work.”

  “How can I, when all this is going on?”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” said Joseph. “You voted for Brexit because the Poles and all that were undercutting you. But now they’re not. Why aren’t you out there coining it?”

  “But Brexit hasn’t happened, has it?”

  “Why does that matter? The bit that you wanted has happened.”

  “It matters because out means . . .”

  “Ah, don’t say, ‘Out means out.’ Or, ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ Please. I’d just like to go one day without hearing that something means something that’s exactly the same word. Of course it bloody does. How can it not? Cheese means cheese. Christmas means Christmas. But where does that get you?”

  He still didn’t know much about anything. He wasn’t interested in customs unions or backstops, even though he seemed to hear those words every day. But Brexit seemed to have floated clear of its details. It was now like a religion. There were those who believed and those who didn’t, and there were nutters on both sides, marching and shouting, and you could never prove that you were right and somebody else was wrong because nothing happened one way or the other anyway. He was beginning to wonder whether it was driving everyone demented, and the country was losing its collective marbles one by one.

  “We’ve been betrayed. You and me.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Do you live in Britain? Were you one of the seventeen point four million?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  Joseph had never told him that he was one of the seventeen point four million and the sixteen point one million. Chris would feel betrayed by that, as well as everything else.

  “So you’ve been shafted.”

  “Meanwhile you haven’t got eighty quid to pay for a suit.”

  “Some things are more important than money.”

  “You’re right, Chris. I’m going to give up work and fight alongside you.”

  His father looked at him warily.

  “But I won’t be able to buy you this. I’ll need some savings.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” said Chris.

  In Joseph’s experience, the expression “I know what you’re saying” was always followed with a counterargument, but Chris just stopped there. Joseph got his bank card out. His father didn’t seem embarrassed.

  * * *

  —

  The reason for the suit was Grace’s wedding, and the wedding was at his mother’s church. Joseph hadn’t thought of it as his church for a long time. He hadn’t been for months, maybe years now. He preferred being at home on Sunday mornings, and anyway he’d begun to think that going to church was weird. His mother was surprisingly reasonable about it when he said he had better things to do, and in any case he didn’t believe in God.

  “I wasn’t enjoying you coming with me anyway,” she said. “You always acted like you didn’t want to be there.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “He knew.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Not God.”

  “Yes, God.”

  “God knew I was acting as though I didn’t want to be there?”

  “No. He wasn’t interested in the acting,” she said scornfully. “He knew you didn’t want to be there. He sees into your heart.”

  He wouldn’t mind being there for the wedding, though. It wouldn’t just be the usual lot, the walking dead that depressed the hell out of him. Some of his friends from back in the day would be there, the sons and daughters of his mother’s church friends, the kids he and Grace had grown up with. And Joseph liked Scott’s friends and family. He’d gone on Scott’s stag weekend to Bratislava, where he’d got drunk with Scott’s brothers and mates and, in the absence of anything else to do, fired AK-47s on a shooting range.

  And he was sort of excited about going with Lucy and the boys, probably because Lucy was excited about everything—the event, of course (she loved Grace and Scott), but the church too. She’d always wanted to go, and Joseph thought there was something suspicious about it, something romantic and maybe even patronizing.

  “It’s not one of those chur
ches, you know,” he told her when she was asking for wardrobe advice. “Nobody speaks in tongues, or starts rolling around on the floor.”

  “Please,” she said. “Give me some credit.”

  “Nobody dances. They can’t even sing, most of them. They’re too old. They warble and croak. There might be a bit of swaying, if you’re lucky. And it’s usually half empty. Anyway, Scott’s sister is going to sing ‘Perfect’ by Ed Sheeran, and her mum is playing the piano for that bit.”

  “Great,” said Lucy, but Joseph could see she was a bit disappointed.

  * * *

  —

  But on the bus up to the church with the boys, she couldn’t help thinking that attending the wedding was an achievement, of sorts. For a start, it had been over two years since Joseph slept with Jaz, and as far as she knew there had been no other indiscretion since. They lived together, they celebrated family occasions together, and they never talked about next year, but they talked about next week, and the summer holidays, if the summer was not too far away. She didn’t put any weight on him, but perhaps people were not meant to bear weight, and as a consequence, each day provided the pleasures of companionship and co-parenting, and each week provided the pleasures of sex, sometimes more than once.

  Grace’s wedding was a milestone, of sorts. There wouldn’t be many introductions, or the nerves and self-consciousness that came with them. She would be Lucy, Joseph’s girlfriend (his preferred terminology, not hers), and nobody would think anything of it.

  When they got to the church, Joseph was in animated conversation with Chris.

  “Hi,” said Lucy brightly.

  Joseph kissed her. Chris offered the boys his knuckles for a spud.

  “You’d better give us a couple of minutes,” said Chris. “We’re having a domestic.”

  “We’re not,” said Joseph.

  “We disagree strongly,” said Chris. “We’re related. That’s a domestic.”