Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

The boys were still fighting. Tucker noted gloomily that Jackson was responding to the appearance of his half brothers with enormous relief and enthusiasm; their chief attraction was that they showed no signs of being about to die, unlike their father. Kids could smell these things. The rats who left sinking ships weren’t morally culpable. They were just wired that way.

“How was the zoo, Jackson?”

“It was cool. Natalie bought me this.” It was a pen with a monkey’s head precariously attached to its cap.

“Wow. Did you say thank you?”

“He was impeccably behaved,” said Natalie. “A pleasure to be with. And he knows more or less everything there is to know about snakes.”

“I don’t know how long all of them are,” said Jackson modestly.

The boys stopped wrestling, and a silence fell on the assembled company.

“So here we all are,” said Tucker. “Now what?”

“I suppose this is where you read your last will and testament,” said Natalie. “And we find out which of your kids you love the best.”

Jackson looked at her, and then at Tucker.

“It was Natalie’s idea of a joke, son,” said Tucker.

“Oh. Okay. But I suppose you’d tell us you loved us all the same,” said Jackson, and the tone of his voice implied that this state of affairs would be unsatisfactory and possibly mendacious.

He’d be right, too, thought Tucker. How could he love them all the same? Just seeing Jackson and his ill-concealed bundle of neuroses in the same room as those two solid and, let’s face it, dull and kind of dumb boys exposed the lie for what it was. He could see that fatherhood was important when you actually were a father—when you sat with kids in the middle of the night and convinced them that their nightmares were as insubstantial as smoke, when you chose their books and their schools, when you loved them however hard they made it for you to feel anything other than irritation and occasionally fury. And he had been around for the twins during the first few years, but ever since he’d left their mother, he’d cared for them less and less. How could it be any other way? He’d tried to pretend to himself that all five of them were equally important, but these two annoyed and bored him, Lizzie was poisonous, and he didn’t really know Gracie at all. Oh, sure, most of this was his fault, and he’d like to think that, if he and Carrie had survived, Jesse and Cooper wouldn’t be quite so fucking characterless. But the truth was that they were fine. They had a perfectly serviceable dad with his own car-rental company, and they were mystified by everybody’s insistence that their relationship with a man who lived far away was somehow important to their well-being. Meanwhile, Jackson tweaked some kind of nerve in his dad’s gut simply by turning the TV on when he was still half-asleep in the morning. You couldn’t love people you didn’t know, unless you were Christ. Tucker knew enough about himself to accept that he wasn’t Christ. So who did he love, apart from Jackson? He ran through a quick mental checklist. No, Jackson was pretty much it, nowadays. With five kids and all the women, he never thought for a moment that a shortage of numbers was going to be his particular problem. Weird how things turned out.

“I’m pretty tired,” he said. “How about you all go and visit Lizzie?”

“Will Lizzie want to be visited by us, though?” Carrie asked.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s part of the point of all this. That we get to know each other as a family.” And if it all happened in somebody else’s hospital room, then so much the better.

They came back a couple of hours later, giggly and apparently melded together into a coherent unit. They had picked up an extra member, too, a young man with a ridiculous bushy beard who was carrying a guitar.

“Have you met Zak?” said Natalie. “He’s your something or other. Your common-law son-in-law.”

“Big fan,” said Zak. “I mean, really big.”

“That’s nice,” said Tucker. “Thank you.”

“ Juliet changed my life.”

“Great. I mean, great if your life needed changing, that is. Maybe it didn’t.”

“It did.”

“So, great. Happy to have helped.”

“Zak wants to play you a couple of his songs,” said Natalie. “But he was too shy to ask, himself.”

How bad could death be, really, Tucker wondered. A quick heart attack and out, and he would have avoided hearing songs by bearded common-law sons-in-law for his entire life.

“Be my guest,” said Tucker. “You got a captive audience.”

“Who’s yours?” Gina asked Duncan.

They were listening to Naked again. For a week they’d been living off bootleg performances of the Juliet songs: Duncan had made nine different playlists that followed the running order of the album, each taken from different nights of the ’86 tour. Gina eventually professed a preference for studio albums, though, on the grounds that drunk people didn’t shout all the way through her favorite tracks.

“Who’s my what?”

“Your… What does he call her? ‘Princess Impossible’?”

“I don’t know. Most of the women I’ve had relationships with were pretty reasonable, really.”

“That’s not what he’s on about, though, is it?”

Duncan stared at her. Nobody had ever attempted to argue with him about Tucker Crowe’s lyrics. Not that Gina was arguing with him, exactly. But she seemed to be on the verge of an interpretation that differed from his own, and it made him feel a little irritable.

“What’s he on about, then, Oh, great Crowologist?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I’m not setting myself up as an expert.”

“Good,” he said, and laughed. “It takes a while.”

“I’m sure.”

“But isn’t she Princess Impossible because she’s out of reach? Not because she’s an impossible person?”

“Well,” he said generously, “that’s the great thing about great art, isn’t it? It can mean all sorts of things. But by all accounts, she was very difficult.”

“In that first song, though…”

“ ‘And You Are?’ ”

“Yes, that one… There’s that line in there…”

“ ‘They told me that talking to you / Would be chewing barbed wire with a mouth ulcer / But you never once hurt me like that.’ ”

“How does that fit in with her being impossible? If she never once hurt him like that?”

“She became impossible later, I suppose.”

“I thought it was more, you know, her being out of his reach. ‘Your Royal Highness, way up there, and me on the floor below.’ Isn’t it that he thinks he’s out of her league?”

Duncan felt himself panicking a little: a lurch in the stomach, the sort of thing you get when you know you’ve left your keys on the kitchen table just after you’ve shut the front door. He’d invested quite a lot in Juliet’s impossibility. If he hadn’t got it right, then who was he?

“No,” he said, but he offered up nothing more.

“Well, you know more about it than me, as you say. Anyway, if that is what he meant…”

“Which he didn’t…”

“No, but forgetting about Tucker and Juliet, because I’m interested anyway: have you had one of those? When you knew you were out of your depth?”

“Oh, I expect so.” He flicked through the index file of his sexual relationships, much of which consisted of blank cards kept at the back. He looked under I for “Impossible” and D for “Depth, Out of,” but there was nothing. He could think of friends who’d had that sort of experience, but the truth was that Duncan had never so much as attempted to form an attachment to someone as glamorous as Juliet, or indeed to anyone who could be described as glamorous. He knew his place, and it was two floors below, not one, thus preventing any kind of contact at all. You couldn’t even see unattainable women from where he usually stood. If you imagined it all as a department store, he was in the basement, with the lamps and the dishes; the Juliets were all in Ladies’ Intimates, a couple of escalator rides away.