Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“Why would he think that?”

“He asked about the photo on the fridge, and I didn’t want to tell him the truth, and…”

At least Tucker now understood the implied generosity of the handshake.

“So there we are,” said Tucker. “That man thinks I’m Annie’s boyfriend. And he thinks Fucker is Tucker.”

“I was right,” said Jackson. “It’s so, so not funny.”

“No.”

“Cool,” said Jackson. “Because I don’t like it when jokes are funny for everybody else.”

“Anyway,” said Tucker. “All in all, I’m a long way from being me at the moment.”

“Exactly.”

“Do I have to go to all the trouble of proving it?”

“The trouble is, he knows more about Tucker Crowe than you do.”

“Yeah, but I have the documentation.”

About fifteen minutes later, Duncan called her on her cell phone. She was outside the museum with Tucker and Jackson, fishing around in her bag for her work keys: the charms of Gooleness had been exhausted already, so, much earlier than anticipated, she was about to show her guests pieces of long-dead shark.

“I can’t believe you did that,” said Duncan.

“I haven’t actually done anything,” said Annie.

“If you want to make a sad spectacle of yourself around town with someone old enough to be your dad, then that’s up to you. But the Tucker business… What’s the point? Why would you do that?”

“I’m actually with him now,” said Annie. “So this is slightly embarrassing.”

Tucker waved at the mouthpiece.

“You should have thought about that before you made him take part in your juvenile games.”

“It’s not a game,” said Annie. “That was Tucker Crowe. Still is. You can ask him any question about himself, if you want.”

“Why are you doing this?” said Duncan.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I sent you a picture of Tucker Crowe a few weeks ago. You know what he looks like. He doesn’t look like a retired accountant.”

“That wasn’t him. That was his neighbor John. Also known as Fake Tucker, or Fucker, because of a misunderstanding that people like you have spread all over the Internet.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. So how did you meet ‘Tucker Crowe,’ actually?”

“He e-mailed me about that review of Juliet, Naked I wrote.”

“E-mailed you.”

“Yes.”

“You post up one piece and you get an e-mail from Tucker Crowe.”

“Listen, Duncan, Tucker and Jackson are standing here and it’s cold and…”

“Jackson.”

“Tucker’s son.”

“Oh, he’s got a son now, has he? And where did he appear from?”

“You know how babies are made, Duncan. Anyway. You saw a picture of Jackson on my fridge.”

“I saw a picture of your retired accountant and his grandson on your fridge. This is a circuitous argument.”

“It’s not an argument. Listen, I’ll call you later. You can come round for tea if you want. Bye.”

And she hung up on him.

Ros had worked hard over the couple of days Annie had spent in London. The day before she left, the two of them had gone over to Terry Jackson’s house to rummage through his collection of Gooleness memorabilia and had ended up taking most of it, in the absence of anything else to show; Terry’s wife, denied the use of a spare bedroom for the whole of her married life because of all the old bus tickets and newspapers, was insisting that it was a gift, not a loan. Terry had been unable to provide any kind of budget for the exhibition, so they were using anything they had on hand—old photo frames, unused dusty cases—to display his stuff. A lot of it was still in garbage bags, a conservation decision that would get them thrown out of the Museums Association if anyone ever found out.

“Gross,” said Jackson, when Annie showed him the eye.

Annie admired his determination to say the right things, but the eye didn’t really stare at you, in the way that Annie and Ros had hoped it might, mostly because it didn’t really look like an eye any longer, unfortunately. They had decided to keep it in the exhibition because of what it said about the people of Gooleness, rather than what it said about sharks, although they would not be explaining their decision to the people of Gooleness.

Tucker liked Terry’s Stones poster, though, and he loved the photograph of the four pals on their day out at the seaside.

“Why does it make me feel sad?” he said. “Even though they’re happy? I mean, sure, they’re all old or dead now. But it’s more than that, I think.”

“I have exactly the same reaction. It’s because their leisure time was so precious, I think. We have so much, by comparison, and we get to do so much more with it. When I first saw it, I’d just had this three-week holiday trekking around the U.S., and…” She stopped.

“What?”

“Oh,” she said. “You don’t know about that, either.”

“What?”

“My American holiday.”

“No,” said Tucker. “But then, we only met recently. There are probably a few holidays I need to catch up on.”

“But this one should have come up in the full disclosure section of our conversation.”

“Why?”

“We went to Bozeman, Montana. And the site of some studio that isn’t there anymore in Memphis. And Berkeley. And the toilet in the Pits Club in Minneapolis…”

“Shit, Annie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why did you go with him?”

“It seemed like as good a way of seeing America as any. I enjoyed it.”

“You went to San Francisco to stand outside Julie Beatty’s house?”

“Ah. No. Not guilty. I let him get on with it. I went to San Francisco to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and to do some shopping.”

“So this guy Duncan… he’s like a real stalker.”

“I suppose he is.”

For a moment, Annie felt a little pang of envy. It wasn’t that she’d ever wanted Duncan to stalk her, exactly. She didn’t want to see him hiding behind her hedge, or ducking behind a supermarket aisle when she was doing her shopping. But she wouldn’t have minded if he’d had the same appetite for her that he’d shown for Tucker. She had only just realized that the man talking to her now was much more of a rival than another woman could ever be.

Duncan poured himself an orange juice and sat down at the kitchen table.

“Gina.”

“Yes, my sweet.”

She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the Guardian magazine.

“What do you think are the chances of Tucker Crowe being in Gooleness?”

She looked at him.

“ The Tucker Crowe?”

“Yes.”

“ This Gooleness?”

“Yes.”

“I’d say the chances were very slim indeed. Why? Do you think you just saw him?”

“Annie says I did.”

“Annie says you did.”

“Yes.”

“Well, without knowing why she said it, I’d have to say that she’s winding you up.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Why did she tell you that? It seems quite a peculiar thing to say. And quite cruel, given your… interests.”

“I was jogging along the beach, and she was there with a, a respectable-looking middle-aged man and a young boy. And I stopped, and introduced myself to the man, and he said he was Tucker Crowe.”

“That must have been a bit of a shock to you.”

“I just couldn’t understand why she made him say it. I mean, it’s not very clever. Or funny. And then I just called her from the bedroom before my shower and she’s sticking to her story.”

“Did he look like Tucker Crowe?”

“No. Not at all.”

They found their eyes straying over to the mantel-piece, and the photograph he’d brought with him when he’d moved in: Tucker onstage, maybe at the Bottom Line, sometime in the late seventies. Duncan could feel the beginnings of another little panic, rather like the panic he’d felt the other night when he was talking to Gina about Juliet . The man he saw on the beach this morning wasn’t the man who’d sung “Farmer John” in a club a few weeks ago, that was for sure. And the man he saw on the beach this afternoon definitely wasn’t the man in the famous Neil Ritchie shot, the wild man lunging for the camera. What was troubling Duncan now was that, for the first time, he’d begun to wonder whether the young man on the mantel-piece could possibly be the crazy person with the matted hair who’d tried to attack Ritchie. They looked nothing like each other, really. Their eyes were different, their noses were different, their coloring was different. He’d never for a second doubted the wisdom of the Crowologists until now; he’d accepted the Neil Ritchie story as a piece of history, fact. Except—and these panics were coming thick and fast now—Neil Ritchie was an idiot. Duncan had never met him, but his ignorance, his rudeness and his self-importance were common knowledge, and Duncan had had an e-mail from him a few years back that had been offensive and a little deranged. Neil Ritchie was a man who’d traveled God knows how many miles in order to invade the privacy of a long-retired singer-songwriter who didn’t want to be disturbed. This, let’s face it, was not normal behavior. And yet this was the man Duncan was prepared to trust more than Annie and the pleasant-looking chap on the beach? If one took the two Farmer John pictures out of the equation and put glasses on the singer in the Bottom Line picture, changed his hair color to silver, trimmed it…