Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“Guys, let’s not argue. Hey, Lizzie,” said Jackson, brightly, “do you eat meat?”

“No,” said Lizzie. “I haven’t touched it since I was your age. It makes me feel sick, and I find the whole industry morally repugnant.”

“But you eat chicken, right?”

Tucker laughed. Lizzie didn’t.

When Cat heard the truck pull into the driveway, she opened the screen door and stood on the porch, restraining Pomus so he didn’t jump all over their guest. Tucker looked at her, trying to gauge her mood. She hadn’t been a whole lot of use during the twins’ visit, but that was mostly to do with their mother: Tucker had told Cat, soon after they’d got together, that his breakup with Carrie had been difficult for him, and he had a vague recollection of implying that the difficulty derived from missing the excellence of the sex. He was surprised that this news pained her. He’d have thought she might be consoled to hear that some relationships were hard to shrug off, that he didn’t just plow through them all unharmed.

Tucker carried Lizzie’s bag into the house and introduced the girls to each other. For a moment they all stood there, frozen and smiling, although Lizzie’s smile was a thin-lipped, functional thing that didn’t indicate too much warmth or pleasure. Cat wasn’t a girl anymore, Tucker realized now that there was an actual girl in the house: life had got at her around the eyes and the mouth and maybe even the middle. He was no longer an old pervert! Cat was a woman! But on the other hand: he and Jackson had ruined her! She’d misspent her youth on them, and they’d repaid her by making her look worried and old! He suddenly wanted to hold her, and say sorry, but right now, moments after a guest daughter had arrived, probably wasn’t the time.

“Go sit in the backyard,” said Cat. “I’ll bring out drinks.”

They walked through the house, Jackson pointing out places of historical and cultural interest—spots where he’d hurt himself, drawings he’d done—along the way. Lizzie appeared underwhelmed.

“I thought you lived on a farm,” she said, when they were settled on chairs and benches.

“Why did you think that?” said Tucker.

“I read it on Wikipedia.”

“And did you read about yourself there? Or Jackson?”

“No. It said you were rumored to have one child, with Julie Beatty.”

“So why would you believe them when they tell you I live on a farm? Anyway, you have my phone number and my e-mail address. Why didn’t you just ask me where I lived?”

“It seemed like too weird a question to ask my own father. Maybe you should write your own Wikipedia page. So your children know something about you.”

“We have animals,” said Jackson defensively. “Chickens. Pomus. One rabbit that died.”

The rabbit had been recommended to them as a way to assuage Jackson’s fears about the imminent death of his father. Tucker couldn’t remember precisely how the idea was supposed to work—maybe that the kid would learn about the natural order of things by looking after a pet over its natural life span, was that it? It made sense at the time, but the rabbit died after two days, and now Jackson talked about his dead rabbit all the time. It was true, however, that he seemed slightly more phlegmatic about the end of Tucker’s life, expected any day now.

“The rabbit’s buried just over there,” Jackson told Lizzie, pointing at the wooden cross on the edge of the lawn. “Dad’s going next to him, aren’t you, Dad?”

“Yep,” said Tucker. “But not yet.”

“Soon, though,” said Jackson. “Maybe when I’m seven?”

“After that,” said Tucker.

“Well. Maybe,” said Jackson, doubtfully, as if the point of the conversation was to console Tucker. “Is your mom dead yet, Lizzie?”

“No,” said Lizzie.

“Is she well?” Tucker asked.

“She’s very well, thank you for asking,” said Lizzie. Was there acid in there? Probably. “She was the one who thought I should come to see you.”

“Okay,” said Tucker.

“It’s that thing,” said Lizzie.

“Uh-huh.” This thing, that thing… They all turned out to be the same thing, more or less, so why insist on a definition?

“When you find out you’re going to have a kid of your own, you want to understand more about everything else.”

“Sure.”

“You guessed, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“What I just said.”

He got the feeling that there had been some information given to him that he hadn’t processed properly yet. Maybe he shouldn’t treat these getting-to-know-you conversations as a genre.

“Hold on,” said Jackson. “That means… You’re my sister, right?”

“Half sister.”

“So… I’m going to be… What does that mean?”

“You’re going to be an uncle.”

“Cool.”

“And he’s going to be a granddad.”

Tucker finally understood what he was being told when Jackson burst into tears and went running to find his mother.

Finally, Lizzie thawed a little—at least on the side nearest Jackson, when Tucker led him back a couple of minutes later.

“It doesn’t mean your dad’s old,” she said. “He’s not.”

“Okay, so how many other kids at my school have dads who are granddads?”

“I’m sure not many.”

“None,” said Jackson. “Not one.”

“Jack, we’ve been through this,” said Tucker. “I’m fifty-five. You’re six. I’m gonna live a long time. You’ll be a big man before I’m ready to go. Forty, maybe. You’ll be sick of me.”

Tucker wouldn’t want to bet on the life span he was predicting for himself. Thirty years of smoking, ten years of alcohol dependence… He’d be amazed if he even got his threescore years and ten.

“You don’t know I’ll be forty,” said Jackson. “You might die tomorrow.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You might.”

Tucker always got sidetracked by the logic in these conversations. Yes, I might die tomorrow, he wanted to say. But that was true even before you found out I was going to be a grandfather. Instead of embarking on paths like these, however, he just had to talk rubbish. Rubbish always worked.

“I can’t.”

Jackson looked at him, hope renewed.

“Really?”

“Nope. If there’s nothing wrong with me today, I can’t die tomorrow. There’s just not enough time.”

“What about a car crash?”

Which anyone of any age could have at any time, you moron.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not going anywhere in the car tomorrow.”

“The day after.”

“Or the day after.”

“How will we get food?”

“We have a ton of food.”

Tucker didn’t want to be thinking about whether they’d be starved out if they couldn’t drive anywhere. He wanted to think about how old he was, and how he was going to die soon, and how his whole life seemed to have slipped away without him noticing.

A while back, Tucker had promised himself that he’d sit down with a piece of paper and try to account for the last couple of decades. He’d write the years down in sequence on the left-hand side, and write down one or two words next to each, words that would at least give some sense of what might have occupied him in those twelve months. The word “booze” and a few ditto marks would do for the end of the eighties; occasionally he’d picked up a guitar or a ballpoint, but mostly he’d just watched TV and poured scotch down his throat until he blacked out. There were other, healthier words he could use later on—“painting,” “Cooper and Jesse,” “Cat,” “Jackson,” but actually, even they didn’t explain away as many months as he’d be asking them to. How long had he really spent in that tiny apartment he’d rented and used as a studio in the painting years? Six months? And his sons, in the years they were born… He’d taken them for walks, sure, but a lot of the time they’d been nursing, or sleeping, and he’d watched them do both. But then, watching was an activity, right? You couldn’t do much else, if you were watching.