Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“I don’t know if I’m capable of looking after you. I mean, what have they done to you? And what still needs doing?”

“They gave me an angioplasty.”

“Ah. Well I don’t even know what that is. I couldn’t give you another one.”

“Jesus, I wouldn’t ask you to.”

Was it all in her imagination, or was this part of the conversation vaguely smutty? Smutty and prudish all at the same time, seeing as she was refusing to do things and he was saying he wouldn’t ask for them in the first place? Almost certainly, it was her imagination. Maybe if she’d taken Barnesy up on his offer the other night, she’d be less preoccupied now.

“What is it?”

“Basically, they put little balloons into you and blow them up to clear your arteries.”

“So you’ve had an operation? In the last thirty-six hours?”

“It wasn’t such a big deal. They stick the balloons in with a catheter.”

“And do you really want to run away from your kids, when they’re flying halfway across the world to see you?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. It was the kind of yes that knew its own mind.

“Your boys? They fly across the Atlantic, aged… What… ?”

“Twelve. Give or take.”

“…And their dad has checked out of the hospital and can’t be found?”

“Precisely. It’s not any one child I don’t want to see. It’s all of them. Because you know what? I’ve never seen them all in the same room, together. Never have, never wanted to. So I need to get out while the going’s good.”

“Seriously? You’ve never been with all your children at the same time?”

“God, no. The mechanics of that…” He shuddered theatrically.

“How long have you got? Before they all get here?”

“The boys arrive this afternoon. Lizzie’s downstairs, Jackson you know about… So that just leaves Grace. Nobody seems to know where she is.”

“Where does she live?”

“Ah,” he said. “Well. Now this isn’t going to sound good.”

“You’re not sure?”

“ ‘Not sure’ is a kind way of putting it. It suggests I might be able to offer you some kind of idea.”

“But someone knows?”

“Oh, someone always knows. The most recent partner always has a way of getting in touch with the one before. So they just work the chain all the way back.”

“How come they know how to get in touch?”

“Because I let the women make the arrangements involving children, I guess. I wasn’t very good at it, and the current partner always wanted to show the previous one she was a decent and caring human being, so… I know, I know. It kind of reflects badly on me, doesn’t it?”

Annie tried to get her face to register the disapproval he seemed to be expecting, and then gave up. To disapprove would be to diminish him, turn him into the sort of person she already knew; she wanted and needed to hear about his complicated domestic life, and to suggest that she didn’t much like it might mean that he stopped telling her stories that she would remember forever.

“No,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Really? Why not?”

She didn’t know why not, really. Losing touch with daughters through indolence and carelessness was, on the face of it, an unattractive habit.

“I think… people end up doing things they’re good at. If your partners were better at making arrangements, then what’s the point of leaving it to you to mess up?”

For a moment she allowed herself to imagine that Duncan had a daughter from a previous relationship, and she was the one who had ended up speaking to the child’s mother while he scratched his balls and listened to his Tucker Crowe bootlegs. Is that the view she would have taken in those circumstances? Almost certainly not.

“I don’t think you really believe that. Or if you do, you’re the first woman I’ve ever met who does. But I thank you for your tolerance. Anyway. This isn’t getting me out of here.”

“I’ll get you out when you’ve seen them all.”

“No, see, it’ll be too late by then. The whole point of going is so I don’t see them.”

“I know, but… I’d feel guilty. And you don’t want that.”

“Listen… Will you be able to come again? Tomorrow? Or do you have to go back?”

Incredibly, there was more blushing. Would it never stop? Was she going to blush forever, at anything anyone said? This time it was more of a flush than a blush, a response to the pleasurable sense of being needed by somebody she found attractive, and it occurred to her that the physiological response might have happened at any time in the last fifteen years; it was simply that there’d been no pleasure, of this kind at least, to be taken.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have to go back. I can, you know…” And she could. She could take vacation days and get one of the Friends to open up the museum; she could stay with Linda; she could do whatever it took.

“Great. Hey! Here she is!”

Tucker was referring to the dramatically pale young woman who was walking slowly toward them in her bathrobe.

“Lizzie, meet Annie.”

Lizzie evidently didn’t want to meet Annie, because she ignored her. Annie found herself hoping Tucker would tell her off, but that was unrealistic. These two had to share a hospital, and in any case, Lizzie was scary.

“Grace was in Paris,” she said. “She’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Did you tell her she doesn’t need to come, now that we know I’m not on the way out?”

“No. Of course she needs to come.”

“Why?”

“Because this has gone on long enough.”

“What?”

“You keeping us apart.”

“I don’t keep you all apart. I just don’t get you all together.”

Annie stood up. “I should, you know…”

“So you’ll be in tomorrow?”

Annie looked at Lizzie, who didn’t look back.

“Maybe tomorrow isn’t…”

“It is. Really.”

Annie took his hand and shook it. She wanted to squeeze it, too, but she didn’t.

“Hey, thanks for the books,” he said. “They’re perfect.”

“Good-bye, Lizzie,” said Annie, provocatively.

“Okay. So you can call Grace and tell her she’s not welcome,” said Lizzie.

Annie was getting the hang of it now, and she was quite enjoying it. Even the rudeness was exotic and precious and enviable.

So none of this is really for my benefit,” said Tucker. He said it, he thought, mildly. “Mild” was the word of the week. He was determined to be mild forever, or at least until he had a serious heart attack, at which point he would become serious, or frivolous, depending on the directional advice he received from specialists.

“I’d… I’d sort of hoped it was,” said Lizzie. “I’d sort of hoped that you might want to see us all together.”

There was something weird about Lizzie’s voice. It was deeper than it had been a couple of minutes earlier, before Annie had left. It was as if she were trying out for one of those Shakespeare plays where a young woman disguises herself as a young man. She was speaking more quietly than she usually did, too. And on top of that, her tone was disconcertingly pacific. Tucker didn’t like it. It made him feel as though he were much sicker than he’d been told.

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to have a sex-change operation.”

“Fuck off, Tucker.”

“That’s better.”

“Why should everything be for your benefit, anyway? Can you really not imagine a small pocket of human activity that isn’t?”

“I just thought that you were all gathering because I was dangerously sick. And now that I’m not, we can forget all about it.”