Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“I didn’t really want to come to London to see you. I couldn’t… I couldn’t quite see the point.”

“That was Lizzie’s idea.”

“I mean, the point of any sort of visit, anywhere. I don’t wish to be difficult, Tucker. I think you’re an interesting and talented guy, and I used to love reading stuff about you. Mom kept a whole heap of things. But we don’t have much going on, do we?”

“Not… recently.”

Grace laughed, not unpleasantly.

“Not in the last twenty-two years, anyway.”

She was twenty-two already?

“And I’m pretty sure that my very existence is sort of awkward. I mean, I’ve listened to that album. You can’t hear me in there. Or Lisa.”

“It was a long time ago now.”

“I agree. A long time ago, you chose art over… Well, over me.”

“No, Gracie, I…”

“And I understand. Really. I didn’t use to. But, you know. I like artists. I get it. So what would you do with me now? I can see that there’s room for some painful conversation in a godforsaken town miles from anywhere. But there’s no room for anything after that, is there? Not unless you want to own up to being a phony. And I wouldn’t want you to do that. I’m not sure you’ve got enough going on to let go of Juliet .”

She hadn’t got that degree of perspicacity from Lisa. He could be proud of that.

He went back into the kitchen and handed Annie the handset.

“How did it go?”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I blew that one a long time ago. I’ve been watching too much daytime TV.”

Duncan was making a big deal of putting his coat on, desperate to glean anything he could from what might be his last couple of minutes with Tucker.

“You don’t have to leave,” Tucker said, wearily. Duncan looked at him disbelievingly, a sixteen-year-old who’d just been told that the prettiest girl in class wasn’t going to finish with him just yet.

“Really?”

“Really. I… What you said before—it meant a lot. Thank you. Sincerely.”

And now the prettiest girl in class was taking off her panties and… Actually, this whole analogy was too weird. Weird and disturbingly self-serving, if anyone cared to examine it properly.

“If you would like to talk to me about my work, I’d be happy to do so. I can see you’re serious about it.”

What was the big deal? Why had he spent half his life trying to hide from people like Duncan? How many of them were there? A handful, scattered all over the globe. Fuck the Internet for collecting them all in one place and making them look threatening. And fuck the Internet for putting him right at the center of his own little paranoid universe.

“I really am sorry about taking a pee in Julie Beatty’s toilet,” said Duncan.

“I’m not sure I care as much as I pretended. Off the record? Among certain people, Julie Beatty has enjoyed a long and unsullied reputation as a fiery muse. In retrospect, she was kind of a pretty airhead. If someone pees in her toilet every now and again, it’s a fair price to pay.”

The two biggest parts of a man’s life were his family and his work, and Tucker had spent a long time feeling wretched about both of them. There was nothing much he could do about big chunks of his family now. Things would never be right with Grace, and he could see that his relationship with Lizzie would always wobble between something they could both tolerate and something that would hurt his ears. He wasn’t so interested in the older boys. That left Jackson, which gave him a 20 percent success rate as a father. There was no examination worth taking where you could pass with a mark like that.

It had never occurred to him that his work was redeemable, or that he was redeemable through his work. But as he listened that afternoon to an articulate, nerdy man tell him over and over again why he was a genius, he could feel himself hoping that it might actually be true.

Councillor Terry Jackson had fifteen come to the museum for a private view and seemed pleased with what he’d seen. Indeed, he was so pleased that he now had ambitions for the launch.

“We should try and get a celebrity to come along and open it.”

“Do you know any celebrities?” said Annie.

“No. You?”

“No.”

“Oh, well.”

“Who would you invite if you could?”

“I’m not very good at celebrities. I don’t watch enough TV.”

“Anyone in world history. Fantasy guest.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “And what function would this person be serving? I mean, would we be inviting him or her to say a few words?”

“I would have thought so,” said Terry. “Something to get the local press interested. Maybe even the nationals.”

“I’d have thought that if a dead person from world history opened an exhibition at the Gooleness Seaside Museum, we’d be fighting the media off.”

“So who would you have?”

“Jane Austen,” said Annie. “Or Emily Brontë, I suppose, seeing as we’re not that far from Brontë country.”

“You think the national press would come up here for Emily Brontë? I know they would for Jane Austen. Bol lywood and all that.”

Annie had no idea what this meant and as a consequence chose to ignore it.

“Even for Emily Brontë.”

“Well,” said Terry. He was clearly dubious. “If you say so. Anyway. Let’s keep it within the realms of the possible.”

“So you’re asking me to name a famous person who might actually come to the Gooleness Seaside Museum to open an exhibition? Because that’s different.”

“No it isn’t. Aim as high as you like.”

“Nelson Mandela.”

“Lower.”

“Simon Cowell.”

Terry thought for a moment.

“Lower.”

“The mayor.”

“The mayor’s got another do on. If you’d sorted this out quicker, we could have asked her first.”

“I’ve got an American singer-songwriter from the eighties staying with me at the moment. Would he be any good?”

She hadn’t planned to mention him, but Terry Jackson’s unfair attack on her organizational skills had stung. And in any case, she couldn’t quite believe that he’d chosen to stay: Tucker and Jackson had been with her for three nights already and showed no desire to leave.

“Depends who he is,” said Terry.

“Tucker Crowe.”

“Tucker who?”

“Tucker Crowe.”

“No. No good whatsoever. Nobody’s heard of him.”

“Well, which American singer-songwriter from the eighties would have done the trick?”

He was beginning to annoy her now. Where had this sudden need for celebrity come from? It was always the way, with councillors. At the beginning of a project, it was all about the needs of the town; by the end it was all about the Gooleness Echo .

“I thought you were going to say Billy Joel or someone. Is he a singer-songwriter? He’d have got us out of a hole. Anyway, thanks but no thanks, Tucker Crowe.”

He made air quotes around the name and he chuckled, apparently at the depths of Tucker’s obscurity.

“I’ve an idea,” said Terry.

“Go on.”

“Three words.”

“Right.”

“Have a guess.”

“Three words?”

“Three words.”

“John Logie Baird. Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

“No. Neither of them. Oh. And I should probably say that one of the words is ‘and.’ ”

“‘And’? Like Simon and Garfunkel?”

“Yes. But not them. I think you should give up.”

“I give up.”

“Gav and Barnesy.”

Annie burst out laughing. Terry Jackson looked hurt.

“I’m sorry,” said Annie. “I wasn’t being… That wasn’t the direction I was looking in.”