Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“Not when you phrase it like that, no.”

One thing was clear: the rest of Duncan’s Friday night hadn’t gone well. Annie was tempted to press him for details, but even in her anger she could recognize that the impulse was not a healthy one. It was easy to imagine, though, that this other woman would have been extremely disconcerted by Duncan’s appearance on her doorstep, if that’s where he’d gone. He’d never been equipped with a great deal of diplomacy, intuition or charm, even when they’d first started seeing each other, and the little he did possess would have been eroded by fifteen years of underuse. Clearly, this poor woman was lonely—it was almost impossible to arrive in Gooleness from somewhere else without leaving a trail of unhappiness and failure behind—but anyone desperate enough to usher Duncan straight into her life at eleven o’clock on a Friday night would be unemployable, possibly even under medical supervision. Annie’s guess was that he’d spent a sleepless night on a couch.

“So what should I do?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He was looking to Annie for some firm advice.

“You need to find somewhere to stay, preferably this morning. And after that, we’ll just have to see.”

“But what about my…”

“You should have thought about that before.”

“I’ll just go upstairs and…”

“You do what you have to do. I’ll go out for a couple of hours.”

Later, she wondered how he would have finished the question. What about his what? If she’d been marched down to a bookmaker’s at gunpoint and asked to place a bet on what it was Duncan felt he couldn’t live without for a couple of days, she’d have put her money on Tucker Crowe bootlegs.

While Duncan was packing, she went to work. She told herself—literally, with words muttered under her breath—that she had loads of e-mail to catch up on, but even Malcolm might have deduced, given all the relevant information, that she wanted to see if she’d heard from Tucker. This was her workplace affair, with a man on another continent that she’d never met, and wasn’t ever likely to meet.

The museum didn’t open until two on Saturdays, so there was nobody else around; she killed the first few minutes of the promised two-hour absence by wandering around what was officially and grandly known as “the permanent collection.” It had been ages since she’d really looked at what they asked people to pay to see, and she wasn’t as embarrassed as she thought she might be. Most museums in seaside towns had bathing machines, the peculiar Victorian beach huts on wheels that allowed ladies to go into the sea without exposing themselves to onlookers, but not everybody had a nineteenth-century Punch-and-Judy stall, complete with grotesque puppets. Gooleness, typically, was the last town in the UK to employ dippers and bathers; dippers dunked ladies into the sea, and bathers immersed the gentlemen, and it was a calling that had mostly vanished by the 1850s. Gooleness, however, had been so far behind the times that the museum had late nineteenth-century photographic evidence of both teams. And to her surprise, she could now see that their photograph collection was really pretty good. She stopped before her favorite, a picture of a sand castle competition that must have been held at the turn of the last century. There were very few children visible—one little girl in the foreground, wearing a knee-length dress and a sun hat that might have been made out of newspaper—and the competition seemed to have drawn a crowd of thousands. (Would Ros tell her that this, too, was the best day in some poor coal miner’s life, the day he had a front-row view of the Gooleness sand castle competition in 1908?) But Annie’s eye was always drawn to a woman over on the right, kneeling on the ground, working on a church steeple, in what looked like a full-length overcoat and a peasant sun hat that made her seem as sad and as destitute as an old peasant in the Vietnam War. You’re dead now, Annie always thought when she saw her. Do you wish you hadn’t wasted your time doing that? Do you wish you’d thought, Fuck the lot of them, and taken your coat off so you could have felt the sun on your back? We’re here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sand castles? She would waste the next two hours, because she had to, and then she would never waste another second of however much time she had left to her. Unless somehow she ended up living with Duncan again, or doing this job for the rest of her working life, or watching EastEnders on a wet Sunday, or reading anything that wasn’t King Lear , or painting her toenails, or taking more than a minute to choose something from a restaurant menu, or… It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

Duncan wouldn’t have believed it was possible to feel more miserable than he’d felt in the Indian restaurant, telling Annie that he’d been unfaithful and then watching her walk out. But actually, packing his suitcase was, if anything, slightly more uncomfortable. True, the infidelity conversation had involved the most excruciating eye contact he’d ever had to put himself through; it would be a while before he forgot the hurt and the anger he’d had to look at in Annie’s eyes, and, if he hadn’t known her better, he might have come to the conclusion that there’d been hatred there, too, and possibly some contempt. But now, putting his clothes into a suitcase, he felt physically sick. This was his life, right here, and however many things he put into a bag, he couldn’t take it with him. Even if he could take everything he owned, he’d still be leaving it behind.

He’d spent the previous night with Gina, in Gina’s bed. She hadn’t, as far as he could tell, been surprised to see him; on the contrary, she talked as if she’d been expecting him somehow. Duncan had tried to explain that he would prefer to look on her as a friend with a sofa for the time being, but Gina didn’t seem to understand the distinction, possibly because he hadn’t explained that he was homeless, nor the circumstances surrounding his homelessness.

“I don’t know why you’d want to have sex with me one night and sleep on the sofa the next,” she said.

“Well, of course, they weren’t consecutive nights,” he said, and he could almost hear Annie’s eyeballs rolling in their sockets.

“No, but nothing much has happened in between, has it? Unless you’ve come round here to finish with me. In which case you’re not even sleeping on the sofa. You’re out.” Gina laughed, so Duncan laughed, too.

“No, no. But…”

“Good. That settles it.”

“It’s just that…”

Gina put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.

“You smell beery.”

“I had… I was drinking lager when…” He was trying to remember if he’d ever even mentioned Annie. He’d certainly been conscious of saying “We I” a lot in the two or three conversations he’d had with Gina, as in, “We I can never stop after one episode of The Wire, ” or “We I went on a little tour of the U.S. in the summer,” although Gina had never shown any curiosity in the derivation of this peculiar new pronoun. And then, when he’d trained himself to exclude the existence of Annie, he’d had to reintro duce her, anonymously, because he felt it was beginning to sound as though he’d spent the previous fifteen years going to the cinema and listening to music on his own. So he’d said things like, “Yes, I saw that. With the woman I was, you know, seeing. At the time.”

“I’ve had a rather difficult evening, actually.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes. I can’t remember if I ever mentioned… Anyway, I had something to sort out tonight. Because of you.”