by Nick Hornby
She drives us somewhere.
I know what you’re saying: You’re a pathetic fantasist, Fleming, you wish, in your dreams, etc. But I would never in a million years use anything that has happened to me today as the basis for any kind of sexual fantasy. I’m wet, for a start, and though I appreciate that the state of wetness has any number of sexual connotations, it would be tough for even the most determined pervert to get himself worked up about my sort of wetness, which involves cold, irritation (my suit trousers are unlined, and my legs are being rubbed raw), bad smells (none of the major perfume makers has ever tried to capture the scent of wet trousers, for obvious reasons), and there are bits of foliage hanging off me. And I’ve never had any ambition to do it in a car (my fantasies have always, always involved beds) and the funeral may have had a funny effect on the daughter of the deceased, but for me it’s been a bit of a downer, quite frankly, and I’m not too sure how I feel about sex with Laura when she’s living with someone else (is he better is he better is he better?), and anyway…
She stops the car, and I realize we’ve been bumping along for the last minute or two of the journey.
“Dad used to bring us here when we were kids.”
We’re by the side of a long, rutted dirt road that leads up to a large house. There’s a jungle of long grass and bushes on one side of the road, and a row of trees on the other; we’re on the tree side, pointing toward the house, tilting into the road.
“It used to be a little private prep school, but they went bust years ago, and it’s sat empty ever since.”
“What did he bring you here for?”
“Just a walk. In the summer there were blackberries, and in the autumn there were chestnuts. This is a private road, so it made it more exciting.”
Jesus. I’m glad I know nothing about psychotherapy, about Jung and Freud and that lot. If I did, I’d probably be extremely frightened by now: the woman who wants to have sex in the place where she used to go for walks with her dead dad is probably very dangerous indeed.
It’s stopped raining, but the drips from the trees are bouncing off the roof, and the wind is knocking hell out of the branches, so every now and again large chunks of foliage fall on us as well.
“Do you want to get in the back?” Laura asks, in a flat, distracted voice, as if we’re about to pick someone else up.
“I guess so. I guess that would be easier.”
She’s parked too close to the trees, so she has to clamber out my side.
“Just shift all that stuff on to the back shelf.”
There’s a big road map, a couple of empty cassette cases, an opened bag of Opal Fruits, and a handful of candy wrappers. I take my time getting them out of the way.
“I knew there was a good reason for putting on a skirt this morning,” she says as she gets in. She leans over and kisses me on the mouth, tongues and everything, and I can feel some interest despite myself.
“Just stay there.” She makes some adjustments to her dress and sits on top of me. “Hello. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I looked at you from here.” She smiles at me, kisses me again, reaches underneath her for my fly. And then there’s foreplay and stuff, and then—I don’t know why—I remember something you’re supposed to remember but only rarely do.
“You know with Ray…”
“Oh, Rob, we’re not going to go through that again.”
“No, no. It’s not…are you still on the pill?”
“Yes, of course. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean…was that all you used?”
She doesn’t say anything, and then she starts to cry.
“Look, we can do other things,” I say. “Or we can go into town and get something.”
“I’m not crying because we can’t do it,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s just that…I lived with you. You were my partner just a few weeks ago. And now you’re worried I might kill you, and you’re entitled to worry. Isn’t that a terrible thing? Isn’t that sad?” She shakes her head and sobs, and climbs off me, and we sit there side by side in the backseat saying nothing, just watching the drips crawl down the windows.
Later, I wonder whether I was really worried about where Ray has been. Is he bisexual, or an intravenous drug user? I doubt it. (He wouldn’t have the guts for either.) Has he ever slept with an intravenous drug user, or has he ever slept with someone who’s slept with a bisexual male? I have no idea, and that ignorance gives me every right to insist on protection. But in truth it was the symbolism that interested me more than the fear. I wanted to hurt her, on this day of all days, just because it’s the first time since she left that I’ve been able to.
We drive to a pub, a twee little mock-country place that serves nice beer and expensive sandwiches and sit in a corner and talk. I buy some more fags and she smokes half of them or, rather, she lights one, takes a drag or two, grimaces, stubs it out and then five minutes later takes another. She stubs them out with such violence that they cannot be salvaged, and when she does it I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying, because I’m too busy watching my fags disappear. Eventually she notices and says she’ll buy me some more and I feel mean.
We talk about her dad, mostly, or rather, what life will be like without him. And then we talk about what life will be like generally without dads, and whether it’s the thing that makes you feel grown-up, finally. (Laura thinks not, on the evidence available to date.) I don’t want to talk about this stuff, of course: I want to talk about Ray and me and whether we’ll ever come as close to having sex again and whether the warmth and intimacy of this conversation means anything, but I manage to hold myself back.
And then, just as I have begun to accept that none of this is going to be about me me me, she sighs, and slumps back against her chair, and says, half smiling, half despairing, “I’m too tired not to go out with you.”
There’s a kind of double negative here—“too tired” is a negative because it’s not very positive—and it takes me a while to work out what she means.
“So, hold on: if you had a bit more energy, we’d stay split. But as it is, what with you being wiped out, you’d like us to get back together.”
She nods. “Everything’s too hard. Maybe another time I would have had the guts to be on my own, but not now I haven’t.”
“What about Ray?”
“Ray’s a disaster. I don’t know what that was all about, really, except sometimes you need someone to lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade, and blow it all apart.”
I’d like to talk, in some detail, about all the ways in which Ray is a disaster; in fact, I’d like to make a list on the back of a beermat and keep it forever. Maybe another time.
“And now you’re out of the bad relationship, and you have blown it all apart, you want to be back in it, and put it back together again.”
“Yes. I know none of this is very romantic, and there will be romantic bits at some stage, I’m sure. But I need to be with someone, and I need to be with someone I know and get on with OK, and you’ve made it clear that you want me back, so…”
And wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly I feel panicky, and sick, and I want to get record label logos painted on my walls and sleep with American recording artists. I take Laura’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.
There’s a terrible scene back at the house, of course. Mrs. Lydon is in tears, and Jo is angry, and the few guests that are left stare into their drinks and don’t say anything. Laura takes her mum through to the kitchen and shuts the door, and I stand in the sitting room with Jo, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head and raising my eyebrows and shifting from foot to foot and doing anything else I can think of to suggest embarrassment, sympathy, disapproval, and misfortune. When my eyebrows are sore, and I have nearly shaken my head off its hinges, and I have walked the best part of a mile on the spot, Laura emerges from the kitchen in a state and tugs me by the arm.
“We’re going home,” she says, an
d that is how our relationship resumes its course.
TWENTY-SEVEN
FIVE conversations:
1. (Third day, out for a curry, Laura paying.)
“I’ll bet you did. I’ll bet you sat there, five minutes after I’d gone, smoking a fag”—she always emphasizes the word, to show that she disapproves—“and thinking to yourself, cor, this is all right, I can cope with this. And then you sat and thought up some stupid idea for the flat…I know, I know, you were going to get some guy to paint record label logos on the wall before I moved in, weren’t you? I’ll bet you sat there, smoking a fag, and thinking, I wonder if I’ve still got that guy’s phone number?”
I look away so she can’t see me smile, but it’s no use. “God, I’m so right, aren’t I? I’m so right I can’t believe it. And then—hold on, hold on—” she puts her fingers to her temples, as if she’s receiving the images into her brain—“and then you thought, plenty more fish in the sea, been feeling like a bit of new for ages, and then you stuck something on the hi-fi, and everything was right in your pathetic little world.”
“And then what?”
“And then you went to work, and you didn’t say anything to Dick or Barry, and you were fine until Liz let the cat out of the bag, and then you became suicidal.”
“And then I slept with someone else.”
She doesn’t hear me.
“When you were fucking around with that prat Ray, I was screwing an American singer-songwriter who looks like Susan Dey out of L.A. Law.”
She still doesn’t hear me. She just breaks off a bit of papadum and dips it in the mango chutney.
“And I was all right. Not too bad. Quite good, in fact.”
No reaction. Maybe I should try again, this time out loud, with my voice instead of the inside of my head.
“You know it all, don’t you?”
She shrugs, and smiles, and makes her smug face.
2. (Seventh day, bed, afterward.)
“You don’t really expect me to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because what purpose would it serve? I could describe every second of every time, and there weren’t that many of them, and you’d be hurt, but you still wouldn’t understand the first thing about anything that mattered.”
“I don’t care. I just want to know.”
“Want to know what?”
“What it was like.”
She huffs. “It was like sex. What else could it be like?”
Even this answer I find hurtful. I had hoped it wouldn’t be like sex at all; I had hoped that it would be like something much more boring or unpleasant, instead.
“Was it like good sex or was it like bad sex?”
“What’s the difference?”
“You know the difference.”
“I never asked you how your extracurricular activities went.”
“Yes, you did. I remember. ‘Have a nice time, dear?’”
“It was a rhetorical question. Look, we’re OK now. We’ve just had a nice time. Let’s leave it at that.”
“OK, OK. But the nice time we’ve just had…was it nicer, as nice, or less nice than the nice times you were having a couple of weeks ago?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Oh, come on, Laura. Just say anything. Fib, if you want. It’d make me feel better, and it’d stop me asking you questions.”
“I was going to fib, and now I can’t, because you’d know I was fibbing.”
“Why would you want to fib, anyway?”
“To make you feel better.”
And so it goes. I want to know (except, of course, I don’t want to know) about multiple orgasms and ten times a night and blow jobs and positions that I’ve never even heard of, but I haven’t the courage to ask, and she would never tell me. I know they’ve done it, and that’s bad enough; all I can hope for now is damage limitation. I want her to say that it was dull, that it was bog-standard, lie-back-and-think-of-Rob sort of sex, that Meg Ryan had more fun in the delicatessen than Laura had at Ray’s place. Is that too much to ask?
She props herself up on an elbow and kisses me on the chest. “Look, Rob. It happened. It was good that it happened in lots of ways, because we were going nowhere, and now we might be going somewhere. And if great sex was as important as you think it is, and if I’d had great sex, then we wouldn’t be lying here now. And that’s my last word on the subject, OK?”
“OK.” There could have been worse last words, although I know she’s not saying anything much.
“I wish your penis was as big as his, though.”
This, it would appear, judging from the length and volume of the ensuing snorts, giggles, guffaws, and roars, is the funniest joke Laura has ever made in her life—the funniest joke that anyone has ever made, in fact, in the entire history of the world. It is an example, I presume, of the famous feminist sense of humor. Hilarious or what?
3. (Driving down to her mum’s, second weekend, listening to a compilation tape she has made that features Simply Red and Genesis and Art Garfunkel singing “Bright Eyes.”)
“I don’t care. You can make all the faces you want. That’s one thing that’s changing around here. My car. My car stereo. My compilation tape. On the way to see my parents.”
We let the s hang in the air, watch it try to crawl back where it came from, and then forget it. I give it a moment before I return to fight possibly the bitterest of all the bitter battles between men and women.
“How can you like Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke? It’s like saying you support the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
“It’s not like saying that at all, actually, Rob. Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke make pop records, the Israelis and the Palestinians don’t. Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke are not engaged in a bitter territorial dispute, the Israelis and the Palestinians are. Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke…”
“OK, OK. But…”
“And who says I like Solomon Burke, anyway?”
This is too much.
“Solomon Burke! ‘Got to Get You off My Mind’! That’s our song! Solomon Burke is responsible for our entire relationship!”
“Is that right? Do you have his phone number? I’d like a word with him.”
“But don’t you remember?”
“I remember the song. I just couldn’t remember who sang it.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
“See, this is the sort of moment when men just want to give up. Can you really not see the difference between ‘Bright Eyes’ and ‘Got to Get You off My Mind’?”
“Yes, of course. One’s about rabbits and the other has a brass band playing on it.”
“A brass band! A brass band! It’s a horn section! Fucking hell.”
“Whatever. I can see why you prefer Solomon to Art. I understand, really I do. And if I was asked to say which of the two was better, I’d go for Solomon every time. He’s authentic, and black, and legendary, and all that sort of thing. But I like ‘Bright Eyes.’ I think it’s got a pretty tune, and beyond that, I don’t really care. There are so many other things to worry about. I know I sound like your mum, but they’re only pop records, and if one’s better than the other, well, who cares, really, apart from you and Barry and Dick? To me, it’s like arguing the difference between McDonald’s and Burger King. I’m sure there must be one, but who can be bothered to find out what it is?”
The terrible thing is, of course, that I already know the difference, that I have complicated and informed views on the subject. But if I start going on about Whoppers versus Quarter Pounders with Cheese, we will both feel that I have somehow proved her point, so I don’t bother.
But the argument carries on, goes around corners, crosses the road, turns back on itself, and eventually ends up somewhere neither of us has ever been before—at least, not sober, and not during daylight hours.
“You used to care more about things like Solomon Burke than you do now,” I tell her. “When I first met you, and I made you that t
ape, you were really enthused. You said—and I quote—‘It was so good that it made you ashamed of your record collection.’”
“Shameless, wasn’t I?”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I fancied you. You were a DJ, and I thought you were groovy, and I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I wanted one.”
“So you weren’t interested in the music at all?”
“Well, yes. A bit. And more so then than I am now. That’s life, though, isn’t it?”
“But you see…That’s all there is of me. There isn’t anything else. If you’ve lost interest in that, you’ve lost interest in everything. What’s the point of us?”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes. Look at me. Look at the flat. What else has it got, apart from records and CDs and tapes?”
“And do you like it that way?”
I shrug. “Not really.”
“That’s the point of us. You have potential. I’m here to bring it out.”
“Potential as what?”
“As a human being. You have all the basic ingredients. You’re really very likable, when you put your mind to it. You make people laugh, when you can be bothered, and you’re kind, and when you decide you like someone then that person feels as though she’s the center of the whole world, and that’s a very sexy feeling. It’s just that most of the time you can’t be bothered.”
“No,” is all I can think of to say.
“You just…you just don’t do anything. You get lost in your head, and you sit around thinking instead of getting on with something, and most of the time you think rubbish. You always seem to miss what’s really happening.”
“This is the second Simply Red song on this tape. One’s unforgivable. Two’s a war crime. Can I fast-forward?” I fast-forward without waiting for a reply. I stop on some terrible post-Motown Diana Ross thing, and I groan. Laura plows on regardless.
“Do you know that expression, ‘Time on his hands and himself on his mind’? That’s you.”
“So what should I be doing?”
