Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“Go on.”

“Oh, you know. The usual thing.”

“How did you meet her?”

It struck Duncan that, as they were already in the kingdom of the self-deprecating, he had to come up with something, otherwise it was all too grim. Nobody was so big a loser that he didn’t even have a story about losing. He tried to conjure up the kind of exoticism Gina would be expecting; he saw dramatic eye makeup, elaborate hairdos, glit tery clothes.

“Do you remember that band the Human League?”

“Yes! Of course! God!”

Duncan smiled enigmatically.

“You went out with one of the girls in the Human League?”

And immediately Duncan lost his nerve. There was probably a website which provided a helpful list of the names of all the men that the girls in the Human League had dated; she’d be able to check.

“Oh, no, no. My… ex wasn’t actually in the Human League. She was in a sort of second-rate version. At college.” This was more like it. “Same deal, synthesizers and funny haircuts. Anyway, we didn’t last very long. She went off with a bass player from, from some other eighties band. What about yours?”

“Oh, an actor. He slept with everyone at drama college. I was silly enough to think I was different.”

He’d negotiated that pretty well, he thought. They were well matched in their failures. He was, however, still feeling uneasy about whether he’d spent two decades misreading the tenor of the relationship between Tucker and Juliet.

“Does it make any difference, do you think? Whether Juliet was impossible as in difficult or impossible as in out of reach?”

“Any difference to what? Or who?”

“I don’t know. I just… I’d feel a bit daft if I’d been wrong all this time.”

“How can you be wrong? You know more about this album than anyone on the planet. Anyway. Like you say. There’s no such thing as wrong.”

Had he ever listened to Juliet in the way Gina heard it? He was beginning to wonder. He’d like to think that there wasn’t a single allusion he’d missed, in the lyrics or in the music: the steal from Curtis Mayfield here, the nod to Baudelaire there. But maybe he’d spent so long underneath the surface of the album that he’d never come up for air, never heard what a casual listener might hear. Maybe he’d spent too long translating something that had been written in English all along.

“Oh, let’s change the subject,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Gina. “It must be awfully annoying, me chirruping away without knowing the first thing about anything. I can see how this sort of thing gets addictive, though.”

When Annie went to visit Tucker the next morning, he was dressed and ready to go. Jackson was sitting beside him, red-faced and looking swamped in a blue puffy jacket that had clearly not been designed with warm hospitals in mind.

“Okay,” said Tucker. “Here she is. Let’s go.”

The two of them walked past Annie and toward the door. Jackson’s showy determination, all jutting jaw and quick, even steps, led Annie to believe that the move had been rehearsed to within an inch of its life.

“Where are we going?” said Annie.

“Your place,” said Tucker. He was already halfway down the hall, so she could only catch his words by scurrying after him, and even then she nearly dropped them.

“My hotel? Or Gooleness?”

“Yeah. That one. The seaside-y one. Jackson needs some saltwater taffy. Don’t you, Jackson?”

“Yum.”

“Some what? I’ve never heard of it. You won’t be able to find it.”

The elevator had arrived, and she squeezed in just as the doors were shutting.

“What do you have that he’d like, then?”

“Probably rock candy. But it’s pretty bad for your teeth,” said Annie.

What, she wondered, was her immediate ambition here? Did she want to become the wanton lover of a rocker, or a home-care nurse? Because she suspected that the two careers were incompatible.

“Thanks,” said Tucker. “I’ll watch out for that.”

She looked at him, to see if there was anything in his expression other than impatience and sarcasm. There wasn’t.

The elevator pinged, and the door opened. Tucker and Jackson strode out onto the street, and immediately they started trying to hail cabs.

“How do you know when they’re busy? I can’t remember,” said Tucker.

“The yellow lights.”

“Which yellow lights?”

“You can’t see it because they’re all busy. Tucker, listen…”

“Yellow light, Dad!”

“Cool.”

The cab pulled over, and Tucker and Jackson got in.

“Which railway station do we need?”

“King’s Cross. But…”

Tucker gave the cabdriver complicated instructions involving a west London address, which Annie presumed was Lizzie’s place, and a long journey back across town to the station. She was pretty sure they’d need to stop at an ATM. He had no money and he’d be shocked by the fare.

“You coming with us?” said Tucker, as he tugged on the door handle of the cab. It was, of course, a rhetorical question, and she was tempted to decline the invitation, just to see what he said. She jumped in.

“We have to get our luggage from Lizzie’s place first. Do you know the train schedule?”

“We’ll miss the next one. But probably we’ll only have to wait half an hour or so for the one after.”

“Time for a comic book, a cup of coffee… I don’t know if I’ve ever been on an English train.”

“Tucker!” said Annie. The word came out shrill and unpleasant, and much louder than she had intended; Jackson looked at her in alarm. If she were him, she would be wondering how much fun this seaside holiday was going to be. But she had to interrupt the constant deflecting flow of chatter somehow.

“Yes,” said Tucker mildly. “Annie?”

“Are you okay?”

“I feel fine.”

“I mean, are you allowed to just walk out of hospital without telling anybody?”

“How do you know I haven’t told anybody?”

“I’m just guessing. From the speed at which we left the hospital.”

“I said good-bye to a couple people.”

“Who?”

“You know. Friends I’ve made in there. Hey, is that the Royal Albert Hall?”

She ignored him. He shrugged.

“Have you still got any balloons inside you? Because you won’t find anyone to take those out in Gooleness.”

This wasn’t turning out right. She was talking to him as if she were his mother—if, that is, he’d been born somewhere in Yorkshire or Lancashire in the 1950s, to parents who ran a boardinghouse. She could almost hear the bare linoleum and the boiled liver in her voice.

“No. I told you. I might have some little vent thing left in there. But it won’t bother you.”

“Well, it will bother me if you keel over and snuff it.”

“What does ‘keel over and snuff it’ mean, Dad?”

“Doesn’t mean anything. English crap. We don’t have to come and stay, okay? If you’re uncomfortable, just drop us off at a hotel somewhere.”

“Have you seen all your family?” If she could just get through her list of questions, she would turn herself into a host—a good one, welcoming and worldly and obliging.

“Yep,” said Tucker. “We had a jolly old tea party yesterday afternoon. Everyone’s fine, everyone got on, all good. My work there is done.”

Annie tried to catch Jackson’s eye, but the boy was staring out of the taxi window with a suspicious intensity. She didn’t know him, but it seemed to her that he was trying not to look at her.

She sighed. “Okay, then.” She had done her part. She had checked on his health, and she had checked on whether he had fulfilled his paternal responsibilities. She couldn’t refuse to believe him. And she didn’t want to do that anyway.