Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“There’s a book group,” said Ros. “But not in Gooleness, you know, proper. In a village just outside. You could borrow my car.”

“And there are single men in it?”

“Well, no. Not at the moment. But a friend who belongs feels that if there were any single arts-graduate males in the area, that’s where they’d wash up eventually. There was one a couple of years ago, apparently. Anyway. Just a thought. And the other one I had was that we could go away for the weekend. To Barcelona, maybe. Or Reykjavik, if Iceland still exists.”

“So. Let’s get this straight. The best way to have sex in Gooleness is either to join a book club not actually in the town, with no men in it, or to go to another country.”

“These are just initial ideas. Others will come. And we haven’t even touched on Internet dating. Ah. Look. As if by magic.”

Two men in their early forties had come into the pub. While one was at the bar buying two pints of lager, the other was examining the jukebox. Annie studied him and tried to imagine taking off her clothes for him or with him. Would he even want her to? She had absolutely no idea whether she was even passably attractive; she felt as though she hadn’t looked in a mirror for years. She was about to ask Ros (and surely having a lesbian friend would be helpful, or was that not how it worked?) when he started shouting at his friend.

“Gav! Gav!”

The music he’d chosen came on, a bright, fast and tinny soul song that sounded like Tamla Motown but wasn’t.

“Fucking hell!” said Gav. “Go on, Barnesy. Get yourself warmed up.”

“Too much carpet,” said Barnesy, who was small, skinny and muscular, and wearing baggy trousers and a Fred Perry sports shirt. If he were sixteen years old, and she was his teacher, Annie would have had him pegged for the kind of kid who would start a fight with the biggest guy in the class, just to show that he wasn’t scared.

He put down the duffel bag he was carrying anyway, despite the carpet. It clearly wouldn’t take much to push Barnesy over the edge, even though it wasn’t entirely clear what lay beneath.

“Don’t make excuses,” said Gav. “These ladies want to see what you’ve got. Don’t you, ladies?”

“Well,” said Ros. “Some of it.”

That, Annie thought, was the sort of thing she’d have to come up with if she were ever to start picking up men in pubs. It was the speed that intimidated her. It wasn’t as if “Some of it” was a Wildean one-liner, but it did the job, and both men laughed. Annie, meanwhile, was still trying to twist her mouth into a polite smile. It would take her five minutes to complete the smile, and probably another twenty-four hours to produce an accompanying snappy verbal response. Gav and Barnesy would probably have left by then.

What Barnesy had, it turned out, was an extraordinary array of gymnastic dance moves, which he proceeded to demonstrate for the duration of the song. To Annie’s untutored eye, Barnesy was a heady mix of break-dancer, martial-arts warrior and Cossack—there were spins and flailing arms and push-ups and kicks—but it was his complete lack of embarrassment, his absolute confidence that what he was doing was something the half dozen people in the pub would want to see, that was really impressive.

“Good God,” said Ros, when he’d finished. “What was that?”

“What do you mean, what was that?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You don’t live in Gooleness then?”

“I do, actually. We both do.”

“And you’ve never seen northern soul dancing?”

“I can’t say I have. You, Annie?”

Annie shook her head and blushed. What was the blush for, actually? Why was she embarrassed to say that she hadn’t seen northern soul dancing before? She wanted to punch her stupid treacherous cheeks in.

“That’s what Gooleness is ,” said Barnesy. “The Gooleness all-nighters. We’ve been coming here since eighty-one, haven’t we, Gav?”

“Where from?”

“Scunny. Scunthorpe.”

“You come all the way to Gooleness from Scunthorpe to do northern soul dancing?”

“’Course we bloody do. Only fifty miles.”

Gav came back from the bar with their beers and put them down on the table at which Annie and Ros were sitting.

“What are you doing tonight?”

For a moment, Annie had the absurd notion that Ros was going to tell them precisely what they were doing, and that Gav or Barnesy or both would offer themselves up as the solution to the sex problem. She didn’t think she wanted sex with either of them.

“Nothing,” said Annie, quickly. The speed of the response, the eagerness it seemed to contain, was the diametric opposite of what she was after. By jumping in to stop Ros from talking about the sex plan, it seemed to her, she was more or less offering sex.

“Well, there we are then,” said Gav, who seemed too chubby to be a northern soul dancer, if Barnesy’s moves were indicative of the kind of stuff a northern soul dancer needed to strut. “We’re laughing, aren’t we? Two good-looking men, two good-looking women.”

“Ros here is gay,” said Annie. And then, helpfully, “A lesbian,” as if this might clear up any doubts anyone had about the variety of homosexuality Ros subscribed to. If she had succumbed to the temptation to punch her own cheeks in earlier, the chances are that she wouldn’t have been able to say anything quite so mortifyingly crass. Ros, to her credit, merely groaned and rolled her eyes. She would have been entitled to walk out of the pub and never contact Annie again.

“Annie!”

“A lesbian?” said Gav. “A real one? In Gooleness?”

“She’s not a lesbo,” said Barnesy.

“How can you tell?” said Gav.

“It’s just what birds say when they don’t like the look of you. Do you remember those two at the Blackpool all-nighter? Told us they weren’t into men, and then we saw them with their tongues down the throats of the DJs.”

Ros laughed. “I’m sorry if it seems like a brush-off,” she said. “But I was gay long before you two walked in.”

“Fucking hell,” said Barnesy in wonderment. “You just walk around, gay, like.”

“Yep.”

“I’ve got to tell you,” said Gav, with sudden excitement. “I…”

“You don’t have to tell me at all,” said Ros.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say that, even though gay men make you sick to your stomach, the idea of gay women you find titillating in the extreme.”

“Oh,” said Gav. “You’ve heard that before, have you?”

“How does that work, anyway?” said Barnesy. “If one of you’s gay and the other one isn’t?”

“How does it work?” said Ros, and then “Oh. No. We’re not together. We’re friends.”

“Lezby friends,” said Gav. “Geddit?”

Barnesy punched him hard on the arm. “That’s the second stupid thing you’ve said. If you count the thing she didn’t let you say. How old are you? Fucking idiot. Pardon my language, ladies. Anyway, it don’t really matter, does it?”

“In what way?” said Ros.

“If you wanted to come with us. To be honest, I’m too tired for sex after an all-nighter anyway these days, so you being gay isn’t as much of a problem as it might have been.”

“That’s good to hear,” said Ros.

“I don’t even know what northern soul is,” said Annie. She was almost certain that there was nothing offensive in the admission, and, as far as she could tell, she had managed to make it without her face turning scarlet.

“You don’t know what it is,” said Barnesy, flatly. “How can you not know what it is? You don’t like music, is that it?”