Juliet, Naked

by Nick Hornby

  There were two more pictures. One had been dropped off by a man who’d been sorting through his recently deceased mother’s things; it was a nice enough snapshot of a little girl standing next to a Punch-and-Judy booth. The other, sent without a cover letter, was of the dead shark. Annie felt that she had the dead shark covered, and she wished she’d never mentioned it. She’d included it in her request only as a nudge to the memory of the aging population of the town. She might as well have sent them a notice saying “Diseased-shark pics wanted.” This one seemed to show a hole in the flank where the flesh had simply rotted away.

  She went through the rest of the mail, replied to some e-mails and went out for her coffee. It was only on the way back that she remembered Duncan’s maniacal activity of the night before. She knew that his review had provoked a reaction, because he kept running up- and downstairs, checking his e-mail, reading the comments on the website, shaking his head and chuckling at the strange and suddenly alive world he inhabited. But he hadn’t shown her what he’d written, and she felt she should read it. It wasn’t just that, she realized—she actually wanted to read it. She’d heard the music, even before he had, which meant that for the first time ever she’d formed an opinion about it that hadn’t been filtered through his own intimidating evangelism . . . She wanted to see for herself just how wrongheaded he could be, how far apart they were.

  She logged on to the website (for some reason, she had it bookmarked) and printed the piece so that she could concentrate on it. By the time she’d finished it, she was properly angry with Duncan. She was angered by his smugness, his obvious determination to crow to the fellow fans he was supposed to feel some kind of kinship with; so she was angered by his pettiness, too, his inability to share something that was clearly of value in that shrinking and increasingly beleaguered community. But most of all, she was angered by his perversity. How could those sketches for songs be better than the finished product? How could leaving something half-formed be better than working on it, polishing it, layering and texturing it, shaping it until the music expresses what you want it to express? The more she stared at Duncan’s ridiculous piece, the angrier she got, until she got so angry that the anger itself became an object of curiosity to her: it mystified her. Tucker Crowe was Duncan’s hobby, and people with hobbies did peculiar things. But listening to music wasn’t like collecting stamps, or fly-fishing, or building ships in a bottle. Listening to music was something that she did, too, frequently and with great enjoyment, and Duncan somehow managed to spoil it, partly by making her feel that she was no good at it. Was that it? She read the end of his piece again. “I have been living with Tucker Crowe’s remarkable songs for nearly a quarter of a century, and only today, staring at the sea, listening to ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ as God and Crowe intended it to be heard . . .”

  It wasn’t that he made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself and her tastes. It was the reverse. He knew nothing about anything, and she’d never really allowed herself to notice it until now. She’d always thought that his passionate interest in music and film and books indicated intelligence, but of course it didn’t have to indicate anything of the sort, if he constantly got the wrong end of the stick. Why was he teaching trainee plumbers and future hotel receptionists how to watch American television, if he was so smart? Why did he write thousands of words for obscure websites that nobody ever read? And why was he so convinced that a singer nobody had ever paid much attention to was a genius to rival Dylan and Keats? Oh, it spelled trouble, this anger. Her partner’s brain was dwindling away to nothing while she examined it. And he’d called her a moron! One thing he was right about, though: Tucker Crowe was important, and he revealed harsh truths about people. About Duncan, anyway.

  When Ros stopped by to find out whether they’d made any progress with the photographs, Annie still had the website up on her computer.

  “Tucker Crowe,” said Ros. “Wow. My college boyfriend used to like him,” she said. “I didn’t know he was still going.”

  “He’s not, really. You had a college boyfriend?”

  “Yes. He was gay, too, it turned out. Can’t imagine why we broke up. But I don’t understand: Tucker Crowe has his own website?”

  “Everyone has their own website.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I think so. Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple of dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn’t recorded in twenty years gets talked about every day. It’s what the Internet’s for. That and pornography. Do you want to know which songs he played in Portland, Oregon, in 1985?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then this website isn’t for you.”

  “How come you know so much about it? Are you one of the nine Brits?”

  “No. There are no women who bother. My, you know, Duncan is.”

  What was she supposed to call him? Not being married to him was becoming every bit as irritating as she imagined marriage to him might be. She wasn’t going to call him her boyfriend. He was forty-something, for God’s sake. Partner? Life partner? Friend? None of these words and phrases seemed adequately to define their relationship, an inadequacy particularly poignant when it came to the word “friend.” And she hated it when people just launched in and started talking about Peter or Jane when you had no idea who Peter and Jane were. Perhaps she just wouldn’t ever mention him at all.

  “And he’s just written a million words of gibberish and posted them up for the world to see. If the world were interested, that is.”

  She invited Ros to inspect Duncan’s piece, and Ros read the first few lines.

  “Aaah. Sweet.”

  Annie made a face.

  “Don’t knock people with passions,” said Ros. “Especially passions for the arts. They’re always the most interesting people.”

  Everyone had succumbed to that particular myth, it seemed.

  “Right. Next time you’re in the West End, go and hang out by the stage door of a theater showing a musical and make friends with one of those sad bastards waiting for an autograph. See how interesting you find them.”

  “Sounds like I should buy that CD.”

  “Don’t bother. That’s what gets me. I played it, and he’s completely wrong. And for some reason I’m bursting to say so.”

  “You should write your own review and stick it up next to his.”

  “Oh, I’m not an expert. I wouldn’t be allowed.”

  “They need someone like you. Otherwise they all disappear up their own bottoms.”

  There was a knock on Annie’s open office door. An old lady wearing a hoodie was standing there offering them both an envelope. Ros stepped over and took it.

  “Shark picture,” the old lady said, and waddled off.

  Annie rolled her eyes. Ros opened the envelope, laughed and passed the picture over. It featured the same gaping, diseased wound that Annie’d seen in one of the other photos. But someone had had the bright idea of planting a small child on top of the shark. She was sitting there with her bare feet dangling inches from the hole; both toddler and wound were weeping.

  “Jesus,” said Annie.

  “Maybe nobody went to see the Rolling Stones here in 1964,” said Ros. “The dead shark was just too much fun.”

  Annie started writing her review that night. She had no intention of showing it to anyone; it was just a way of working out whether what she thought meant anything to her. It was also a way of sticking a fork into her irritation, which was beginning to swell like a sausage on a barbecue. If it burst, then she could imagine consequences that she wasn’t yet prepared for.

  She had to write at work—letters, descriptions of exhibitions, captions, bits and pieces for the museum website—but most of the time, it seemed to her, she had to think up something to say, create an opinion from nothing. This was different; it was all she could do to stop herself from following every single one of the strands of thought she’d been chewing on for t
he last couple of days. Juliet, Naked had somehow given her ideas about art and work, her relationship, Tucker’s relationship, the mysterious appeal of the obscure, men and music, the value of the chorus in song, the point of harmony and the necessity of ambition, and every time she finished a paragraph, the next one appeared in front of her, unbidden and annoyingly unconnected to the last. One day, she eventually decided, she would try to write about some of those things, but it couldn’t be here and now; she wanted this essay to be about the two albums, the immeasurable and unquestionable superiority of one over the other. And maybe about what people (Duncan, in other words) thought they heard in Naked that wasn’t actually there, and why these people (he) heard these things, and what it said about them. And maybe . . . No. That was enough. The album had created such mental turbulence that she briefly began to wonder whether it was a work of genius after all, but she dismissed the idea. She knew from her book group that novels none of them had enjoyed could produce stimulating and sometimes even useful conversation; it was the absences in Naked (and, therefore, in Duncan) that had made her think, not the presences.

  Meanwhile, Duncan’s friends on the website had been listening, and several more long reviews had been posted. In Tuckerland, it was something like Christmas; clearly those who believed had stopped work for the festive season, in order to spend time with their extended Internet family and, from the look of some of the pieces of writing, celebrate with a few beers or a spliff. “NOT a masterpiece but masterful nonetheless,” was the headline of one review. “WHEN WILL THE POWERS THAT BE RELEASE ALL THE REAL UNRELEASED STUFF?” said another, who went on to say that he knew for a fact that there were seventeen albums of material in the vaults.

  “Who’s that guy?” she asked Duncan, after trying to read a paragraph of his feverish, occasionally rather affecting prose.

  “Oh. Him. Poor old Jerry Warner. He used to teach English at some public school somewhere, but he got caught with a sixth-form boy a couple of years back, and he’s been a bit off the rails since. Too much time on his hands. Why do you keep looking at the website, anyway?”

  She’d finished her essay now. Somehow Juliet, Naked—or her feelings about it, anyway—had woken her from a deep sleep: she wanted things. She’d wanted to write, she wanted Duncan to read what she’d written. She wanted the other message board members to read it, too. She was proud of it, and she had even begun to wonder whether it might not be socially useful in some way. Some of these cranks, she hoped, might read it, blush a deep crimson and return to their lives. There was no end to her wanting.

  “I wrote something.”

  “What about?”

  “About Naked.”

  Duncan looked at her.

  “You?”

  “Yes. Me.”

  “Gosh. Well. Wow. Ha.” He smiled, stood up and started pacing around the room. This was the closest she would ever get to telling him that he was about to become the father of twins. He wasn’t thrilled by the news, but he knew he wasn’t allowed to be openly discouraging.

  “And do you think . . . Well, do you think you’re qualified to write something?”

  “Is it a matter of qualifications?”

  “Interesting question. I mean, you’re perfectly at liberty to write whatever you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But for the website . . . People expect a certain level of expertise.”

  “In the first paragraph of his post, Jerry Warner says that Tucker Crowe lives in a garage in Portugal. How expert is that?”

  “I’m not sure you’re supposed to take him literally.”

  “So, what, he lives in a Portuguese garage of the mind?”

  “Yes, he’s wayward, Jerry. But he can sing every word of every song.”

  “That qualifies him to busk outside a pub. It doesn’t necessarily make him a critic.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Duncan, as if he had a crazy gut feeling that the receptionist should be offered a place on the board of his company. “Let me see it.”

  She was holding the piece in her hand. She gave it to him.

  “Oh. Right. Thank you.”

  “I’ll leave you to it.”

  She went upstairs, lay down on the bed and tried to read her book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She could hear the sound of his shaking head all the way through the floorboards.

  Duncan read the essay twice, just to buy himself some time; the truth was that he knew he was in trouble after the first reading, because it was both very well written and very wrong. Annie had made no factual errors that he could find (although someone on the boards would always point out some glaring and utterly inconsequential mistake, he found, when he wrote something), but her inability to recognize the brilliance of the album was indicative of a failure in taste that appalled him. How had she ever managed to read or see or listen to anything and come to the right conclusion about its merits? Was it all just luck? Or was it just the boring good taste of the Sunday newspaper supplements? So she liked The Sopranos—well, who didn’t? He’d had a chance this time to watch her have to come to her own conclusions, and she’d messed it up.

  He couldn’t refuse to put the piece up, though. That wouldn’t be fair, and he didn’t want to be put in the position of turning her down. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t get the greatness of Tucker Crowe: this was, after all, a long hymn of praise to the perfection of Dressed. No, he’d post it on the site and let the others tell her what they thought of her.

  He read it through once more, just to make sure, and this time it depressed him: she was better than him in everything but judgment—the only thing that mattered in the end, but still. She wrote well, with fluency and humor, and she was persuasive, if you hadn’t actually heard the music, and she was likable. He tended to be strident and bullying and smart-alecky, even he could see that. This wasn’t what she was supposed to be good at. Where did that leave him? And supposing they didn’t shoot her down in flames? Supposing, instead, that they used her as a stick to beat him with? Naked, which just about everyone had heard by now, was getting a very mixed reaction, and the negative stuff, he feared, had been provoked by his original, overenthusiastic review. He was just beginning to change his mind about accepting her into the community when she appeared in front of him.

  “Well?” she said. She was nervous.

  “Well,” he said.

  “I feel as though I’m waiting for my exam results.”

  “I’m sorry. I was just thinking about what you wrote.”

  “And?”

  “You know I don’t agree with it. But it’s really not bad.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “And I’m happy to put it up, if that’s what you really want.”

  “I think so.”

  “You have to include your e-mail address, you know that.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes. And you’ll get a few nutters contacting you. But you can just delete them, if you don’t want to get involved in a debate.”

  “Can I use a fake name?”

  “Why? Nobody knows who you are.”

  “You’ve never mentioned me to any of your friends?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Oh.”

  Annie looked rather taken aback. But was that so weird? None of the other Crowologists lived in the town, and he only ever talked to them about Tucker, or occasionally about related artists.

  “Have you ever had a contribution from a woman?”

  He pretended to think about it. He’d often wondered why they only ever heard from middle-aged men, but it had never worried him unduly. Now he felt defensive.

  “Yes,” he said. “But not for a while. And even then they just wanted to talk about how, you know, attractive they found him.”

  The only women he could invent, it seemed, were clichéd airheads, unable to contribute to serious debate. He’d only had a couple of seconds to imagine them, but even so, he could and should have done better. If he ever did write
his novel, he’d have to watch that.

  “Do women find him attractive?”

  “God, yes.”

  Now he was beginning to sound weird. Well, not weird, because homosexual attraction wasn’t weird, of course it wasn’t. But he was certainly sounding more vehement about Tucker’s good looks than he had meant to.

  “Anyway. Send me the piece as an attachment and I’ll put it up tonight.”

  And, after only a couple of arguments with himself, he did what he’d promised.

  At work the next morning, Annie found herself logging on to the website a couple of times an hour. At first, it seemed obvious to her that she’d want some feedback on what she’d written—she’d never done this before, so she was bound to be curious about the process. Later in the day, however, she realized that she wanted to win, to beat Duncan hollow. He’d had his say, and for the most part his say had been greeted by hostility, sarcasm, disbelief and envy; she wanted people to be nicer to her than they had been to him, more appreciative of her eloquence and acuity, and, to her great delight, they were. By five o’clock that afternoon, seven people had posted in the “comments” section, and six of them were friendly—inarticulate, and disappointingly brief, but friendly nonetheless. “Nice work, Annie!” “Welcome to our little online ‘community’—good job!” “I completely agree with you. Duncan’s so far off-base he’s disappeared off of the radar.” The only person who wanted to make it clear that he hadn’t enjoyed her contribution didn’t seem very happy about anything. “Tucker Crowe is FINISHED get over it you people are pathetic just going on and on about a singer who hasn’t made an album for twenty years. He was overrated then and he’s overrated now and Morrissey is so much better its embarrassing.”