by Nick Hornby
Where did Juliet come from? Do you know? And what happens to those places? Do they just get overgrown? Or might you stumble across them one day? I’m sorry if that seems too nosy, and I’ve just promised myself that I wouldn’t bombard you with questions. If you want to see any photos of my dead shark, just shout. That seems to be all I have to offer in return.
By the way, when I got home last night I started reading Nicholas Nickleby, in your honour.
Was that last line too creepy? Bad luck if it was. It was true, anyway. This time, she clicked on “send” before she could change her mind.
six
It was okay, Duncan thought, that he and Annie had never been in love. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, and it had functioned perfectly well: friends had matched up their interests and temperaments carefully, and they’d got it right. He had never once felt itchy, in the way that two connecting pieces of a jigsaw never felt itchy, as far as one could tell. If one were to imagine, for the sake of argument, that jigsaw pieces had thoughts and feelings, then it was possible to imagine them saying to themselves, “I’m going to stay here. Where else would I go?” And if another jigsaw piece came along, offering its tabs and blanks enticingly in an attempt to lure one of the pieces away, it would be easy to resist temptation. “Look,” the object of the seducer’s admiration would say, “you’re a piece of a phone booth, and I’m the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. We just wouldn’t look right together.” And that would be that.
He was now beginning to wonder whether the jigsaw was the correct metaphor for relationships between men and women after all. It didn’t take account of the sheer stubbornness of human beings, their determination to affix themselves to another even if they didn’t fit. They didn’t care about jutting off at weird angles, and they didn’t care about phone booths and Mary, Queen of Scots. They were motivated not by seamless and sensible matching, but by eyes, mouths, smiles, minds, breasts and chests and bottoms, wit, kindness, charm, romantic history and all sorts of other things that made straight edges impossible to achieve.
And jigsaw pieces were not known for their passion, really, either. People could be passionate about jigsaws, but the jigsaws themselves were orderly—passionless, even, you could say. And it seemed to Duncan that passion was a part of being human. He valued it in his music and his books and his TV shows: Tucker Crowe was passionate, Tony Soprano, too. But he had never really valued it in his own life, and maybe now he was paying the price, by falling in love at an inopportune time. Later, he wondered whether Juliet, Naked had done something to him—woken him up, shaken some part of him that had gone numb. He’d certainly been more emotional in the days since he first heard it, prone to sudden lurches in the stomach and the occasional, inexplicable prickle of tears.
Gina was a new staff member at the Advanced Performing Arts program, teaching pimply and deluded teenagers that they would never, ever be famous—or, at least, not in their chosen fields, although Duncan harbored the suspicion that some of them were insane enough to stalk and eventually murder somebody they idolized. Gina was a singer, an actor, a dancer, and though she still harbored dreams of doing some of those things professionally, life had worn all of the dreaminess off her. The people who worked in Advanced Performing Arts were freakishly young-looking middle-aged men and women, always waiting for phone calls that never came from touring theater companies and agents; but if Gina still blew on those hopes to keep them glowing gently, she did it outside college hours. And she didn’t talk about herself all the time, either, despite having spiky hennaed hair and a lot of chunky jewelry. She sat next to him on a coffee break on her second day, asked him questions, listened to his answers, proved herself to be knowledgeable about some of the things that were important to him. The day after, when she asked whether she could borrow the first season of The Wire and told him that she’d taken the job to get away from a terminally ill relationship, he knew he was in trouble. Two days after that, he was wondering what happened when a jigsaw piece told his interlocking friend that he wanted to join a different puzzle altogether. And also, less whimsically, he was wondering what sex with Gina would be like, and whether he’d ever find out.
He’d made very few friends on the staff, mostly because he regarded his colleagues as uncultured bores, even the ones who taught arts courses. And they in turn thought he was a weirdo, forever chasing up some obscure tributary of the mainstream to get to the source of whatever he happened to be interested in that week. They thought he was faddish, but in Duncan’s opinion that was because their tastes were set, like concrete, and if the next Dylan came to perform for them in the staff room, they’d roll their eyes and continue to look for new jobs in the Education Guardian. Duncan hated them, and that was partly why he’d fallen so hard for Gina, who seemed to recognize that major works of art were being created every day. She was going to be his soul mate, and in a town like this, with its cold, gray sea and its bingo halls and its shivering senior citizens, soul mates came along every couple of hundred years, probably. How was it possible not to think about sex, in those circumstances?
They went out for a drink on the day he took Season One of The Wire into work with him, hidden inside a newspaper and then placed in his satchel so that Annie wouldn’t see what he was up to. Of course, it was only the secrecy of the act that would have given her any idea, so presumably the smuggling was for his benefit, rather than hers, a way of investing a mundane loan with the faintest scent of adultery. He called Annie to tell her he was going to be late getting home, but she, too, was still at work, and she didn’t seem to be troubled by, or even curious about, his whereabouts. She’d been weird, the last few days. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if she’d met someone, too. Wouldn’t that be perfect? Although he wouldn’t want her to leave until he had worked out whether this thing with Gina had potential, and it was early days, as yet, seeing as they hadn’t actually been on a date.
They cycled, at Duncan’s insistence, to a quiet pub on the other side of town, on the other side of the docks, away from students and staff. She drank cider, a choice Duncan admired, although he was in that frame of mind where anything she ordered—white wine, Baileys and Coke—would have demonstrated her sophistication and exotic singularity. A pint of cider suddenly seemed like the drink he’d been wanting all his life.
“So. Cheers. Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you.”
They took a big pull of their drinks, and made appreciative lip-smacking sounds indicating (a) that they’d earned this drink and (b) they didn’t really know what to say to each other.
“Oh. So.” He delved into his bag and produced the boxed set. “Here it is.”
“Great. What’s it like? I mean, what other programs is it like?”
“Nothing, really. That’s what’s so great about it. It sort of breaks all the rules. It’s a one-off. Unique.”
“Like me.” She laughed, but Duncan saw the opportunity to inject some early sincerity into the occasion.
“I think that’s right,” he said. “I mean, obviously there are loads of ways in which, you know, you’re different from, well, from an American TV series about Baltimore’s underclass. It’s actually about lots of other things, too, but all the other things it’s about doesn’t make it more like you, if you see what I mean, so I won’t go into them.” This wasn’t coming out right, but he was going to plow on anyway. “But in some important ways, you’re the same.”
“Really? Go on. I’m very curious.” She looked amused, rather than appalled. Perhaps he could get away with this.
“Well. I’ve only just met you. But when you were sitting in the staff room earlier today . . .” He just wanted to pay her a compliment, tell her that he found her attractive, that he was glad she’d come to teach at the college. But now he was stuck with this stupid Wire thing. “Well, you stuck out like a sore thumb. In a good way, not a sore-thumb way. Everyone else there is so staid and bitter, and you lit the place up. You’re cheerful, and energetic, and pretty
, and . . . Okay, The Wire isn’t cheerful. Or pretty. But when you look at all the other programs around. Well, you just have to look at it. And you.”
He thought he’d got away with it, just about.
“Thank you. I hope you won’t end up disappointed.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
The terminally ill relationship that Gina had left behind in Manchester was with a choreographer who idolized his mother and hadn’t touched her in two years, or said anything kind to her in three. He was almost certainly gay, and hated Gina for failing to cure him of his attraction to other men. What she most wanted in the world was a kind, attentive man who clearly found her attractive. Sometimes you can see car crashes from a long way off, if the road is straight and both vehicles are heading toward each other in the same lane.
Gina vaguely remembered Tucker Crowe, but she was happy to be educated. The day after their drink, Duncan played her Naked and Dressed, back to back, on her iPod in her small and heartbreakingly under-furnished one-bedroom apartment up the hill at the back of the town, away from the sea and from Annie, and they went to bed together shortly afterward, when she’d said exactly the right things about the rawness and unadorned simplicity of Naked. To Duncan anyway, it was sex that felt like sex, too, something needy and alarmingly uncontrollable, rather than something that happened on Saturdays after he and Annie had rented a DVD. Forty-eight excruciating hours after that, in the Indian restaurant around the corner, he was telling Annie that he’d met somebody else.
She was calm when he told her.
“Right,” she said. “And by ‘met,’ I presume we’re talking about something more than meeting.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve slept with her.”
“Yes.”
Duncan was sweating, and his heart was racing. He felt sick. Fifteen years! Or more, even! Was it really possible simply to jump from the belly of a fifteen-year relationship into the clear blue sky? Was it allowed? Or would he and Annie be made to attend courses, to see counselors, to go away together for a year or two and explore what had gone wrong? But who would make them? Nobody, that’s who. And there was alarmingly little tying him down. He was one of the first people to complain about the increasing encroachment of the state into personal lives, but, actually, shouldn’t there be a little more encroachment, when it came to things like this? Where was the protective fence, or the safety net? They made it hard for you to jump off bridges, or to smoke, to own a gun, to become a gynecologist So how come they let you walk out on a stable, functioning relationship? They shouldn’t. If this didn’t work out, he could see himself become a homeless, jobless alcoholic within a year. And that would be worse for his health than a packet of Marlboros.
“I should qualify that. Yes, I’ve, I’ve, you know, yes, slept with her, as you say, but it may well have been a mistake. Can I ask you: do you find this very upsetting? Because I have to say, I do. I didn’t really think it through.”
“So why are you telling me about it?”
“Would it have been an option for you? Me not telling you?”
“It’s a choice that’s rather difficult to offer, though, isn’t it? It was an option for you. But you can’t really ask me whether I want to know whether you’ve slept with someone else or not. I’d have smelled a rat.”
“Unless I’d asked you when I hadn’t slept with someone else, I suppose. If I’d asked you right at the beginning, and then kept asking you . . .”
“Duncan!”
He jumped. She hardly ever shouted.
“Yes. Sorry. I got sidetracked.”
“Are you telling me you want out?”
“I don’t know. I did know. But now I don’t. It suddenly seems like a big thing to say.”
“And it didn’t earlier on?”
“Not . . . not as big as it should have done, no.”
“Who are you sleeping with?”
“It’s not . . . I wouldn’t use the present continuous. There’s been an, an incident. So ‘Who have you slept with?’ is probably the question. Or, ‘With whom did this possibly one-off incident take place?’ ”
Annie was looking at him as if she might kill him with her cutlery.
“She’s a new colleague at work.”
“Right.”
She waited, and he began to babble.
“She . . . Well, I was just very attracted to her immediately.”
Still nothing.
“It’s been a long time, in fact, since I’ve been as, as drawn to somebody as I am to her.”
Silence, but of a deeper and altogether more menacing quality.
“And she loved Naked. I played it to her last . . .”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Sorry.”
He knew he should apologize, but he wasn’t entirely sure what for. It wasn’t that he was innocent of all charges, or even that he felt he had any kind of defense. It was just that he was no longer sure how many offenses he’d committed. Annie’s irritation at the mention of Naked . . . Was that because he’d played it to Gina? Or because she’d liked it, when Annie hadn’t?
“I do not want to talk about Tucker fucking Crowe in the middle of this.”
So that was probably it: he shouldn’t have mentioned Tucker at all. He could see that.
“Sorry. Again.”
For the first time in a couple of minutes, Duncan found the courage to look at Annie’s eyes. There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar—a house, a view, a partner. This was all ridiculous. He would have to extricate himself from the other situation. Surely, with the henna and the clunky jewelry, Gina must be used to one-night stands. Oh, that sounded terrible. He didn’t mean that. He just meant that she must have moved in circles where the one-night stand didn’t seem particularly shocking. She’d been in touring musicals, for God’s sake. He’d just ignore the whole thing, pretend it hadn’t happened and avoid her during coffee breaks.
“I’m not moving out of my home,” said Annie.
“No. Of course not. Nobody’s asking you to.”
“Good. As long as that’s clear.”
“Completely.”
“So what’s reasonable?”
“What’s reasonable? About what?”
“Tomorrow?”
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
He hoped that she was talking about a social arrangement he’d forgotten. He hoped that normal life was reasserting itself, and they could put this misfortune behind them.
“You’re moving out,” said Annie.
“Oh. Wow. Ha. No, no, that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Duncan.
“It may not be. But it’s what I’m talking about. Duncan, I have just wasted half my life with you. What was left of my youth, in fact. I’m not going to waste another day.”
She picked up her bag, drew out a ten-pound note, threw it on the table and walked out.
seven
And how do you feel about that?”
“I feel shitty, Malcolm. How do you think I feel?”
“Define . . . that word.”
“Like shit.”
“You can do better than that, Annie. You’re an articulate young woman. And I’ll put ten pence in the swear box for you.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll let you off the first one, but the second was gratuitous. I don’t think it’s a good idea to break rules. Whatever the circumstances.”
Malcolm fumbled around in his pocket, found a coin and put it in the novelty piggy bank he kept on the bookshelf behind his head. The piggy bank was designed to spin the coin around and around before it came to its final resting place, so for the next minute or so there was silence; neither of them wanted to speak until the spinning had stopped. It seemed to take even longer than usual for the reassuring clink indicating that this ten pence had
joined the others, all of them representing oaths uttered by Annie in extremis, none of them anything that would shock a ten-year-old.
A few months before, Annie had told Ros that, out of all her dysfunctional relationships, it was the one with Malcolm that caused her the most anxiety. Until the Friday-night curry, Duncan hadn’t been particularly troublesome; she only spoke to her mother for fifteen minutes a week, and saw her rarely since she’d gone to live in Devon. But Malcolm . . . Malcolm she saw every Saturday morning, for a whole hour, and every time she’d raised the subject of not seeing him every Saturday morning, or at any other time, he’d become visibly distressed. Whenever Annie thought about leaving town and her job for Manchester or London or Barcelona, the Malcomlessness of these places came up embarrassingly early in the fantasy—after the absence of Duncan, probably, but sooner than the attractions of food or weather or culture.
Malcolm was her therapist. She’d seen a business card on the bulletin board in the health center when she first started to become depressed about childlessness, but almost immediately she’d known that Malcolm wasn’t right: he was too nervous, too old, too easily shocked, even by Annie, who never did anything to shock anybody. When she’d tried to tell him that he wasn’t right for her, however, he had begged her to reconsider, and had dropped his fee from thirty pounds an hour to fifteen, and then, finally, to five. It turned out that Annie was his first and only client. He’d taken early retirement from the Civil Service to train, it had been his ambition for more than a decade, he would learn quickly, he was the only serious therapist in Gooleness anyway, he’d never find anyone as interesting or as sensitive as her . . . Annie simply hadn’t had the heart, or the necessary steel, to walk away, and she’d been enduring the spinning coins for two years now. She’d refused to entertain the notion of the swear box, which was why it was always Malcolm’s ten-pence pieces that got spun. Why he was so committed to the swear box at all, she had no real idea.
