High Fidelity (8 page)

WHERE
the fuck have you been?” I ask Barry when he turns up for work on Saturday morning. I haven't seen him since we went to Marie's gig at the White Lion—no phone calls, no apologies, nothing.

“Where the fuck have I been? Where the fuck have
I
been? God, you're an arsehole,” Barry says by way of an explanation. “I'm sorry, Rob. I know things aren't going so well for you and you have problems and stuff, but, you know. We spent fucking hours looking for you the other night.”

“Hours? More than one hour? At least two? I left at half-ten, so you abandoned the search at half-twelve, right? You must have walked from Putney to Wapping.”

“Don't be a smartarse.”

One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be able to refer to me without using the word
arse
somewhere in the sentence.

“OK, sorry. But I'll bet you looked for ten minutes, and then had a drink with Marie and thingy. T-Bone.”

I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie.

“That's not the point.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“It was great. T-Bone's played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.”

“Far out.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

I'm glad it's Saturday because we're reasonably busy, and Barry and I don't have to find much to say to each other. When Dick's making a cup of coffee and I'm looking for an old Shirley Brown single in the stockroom, he tells me that T-Bone's played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.

“And do you know what? He's a really nice guy,” he adds, astonished that someone who has reached these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But that's about it as far as staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.

Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just
have
to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (“If I don't find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don't really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.

The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they're driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven't heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had
dreamed
a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, “Happy Go Lucky Girl” by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental.

You can really see what Dick and Barry are for on Saturdays. Dick is as patient and as enthusiastic and as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didn't know they wanted because he knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon they're handing over fivers almost distractedly as if that's what they'd come in for in the first place. Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they don't own the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they don't own
Blonde on Blonde,
so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four o'clock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.

So when I come to close the shop, and we're getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every Saturday, we are all happy together again; we have a fund of goodwill which we will spend over the next few empty days, and which will have completely run out by Friday lunchtime. We are so happy, in fact, that between throwing the customers out and leaving for the day, we list our top five Elvis Costello songs (I go for “Alison,” “Little Triggers,” “Man Out of Time,” “King Horse,” and a bootleg Merseybeat-style version of “Everyday I Write the Book” I've got on a bootleg tape somewhere, the obscurity of the last cleverly counteracting the obviousness of the first, I thought, and thus preempting scorn from Barry) and, after the sulks and rows of the last week, it feels good to think about things like this again.

But when we walk out of the shop, Laura's waiting there for me, leaning against the strip of wall that separates us from the shoe shop next door, and I remember that it's not supposed to be a feel-good period of my life.

THE
money is easy to explain: she had it, I didn't, and she wanted to give it to me. This was when she'd been in the new job a few months and her salary was starting to pile up in the bank a bit. She lent me five grand; if she hadn't, I would have gone under. I have never paid her back because I've never been able to, and the fact that she's moved out and is seeing somebody else doesn't make me five grand richer. The other day on the phone, when I gave her a hard time and told her she'd fucked my life up, she said something about the money, something about whether I'd start paying her back in installments, and I said I'd pay her back at a pound a week for the next hundred years. That's when she hung up.

 

So that's the money. The stuff I told her about being unhappy in the relationship, about half looking around for someone else: she pushed me into saying it. She
tricked
me into saying it. That sounds feeble, but she did. We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else. So I asked if she was always thinking about meeting somebody else, and she said of course, so I admitted that I did daydream about it sometimes. At the time I thought it was a let's-be-grown-up-about-life's-imperfectibility sort of conversation, an abstract, adult analysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer's trick, and I fell for it, because she's much smarter than me.

 

I didn't know she was pregnant, of course I didn't. She hadn't told me because she knew I was seeing somebody else. (She knew I was seeing somebody else because I'd told her. We thought we were being grown-up, but we were being preposterously naive, childish even, to think that one or the other of us could get up to no good, and own up to the misdemeanor, while we were living together.) I didn't find out until ages afterward: we were going through a good period and I made some joke about having kids and she burst into tears. So I made her tell me what it was all about, and she did, after which I had a brief and ill-advised bout of noisy self-righteousness (the usual stuff—my child, too, what right did she have, blah blah) before her disbelief and contempt shut me up.

“You didn't look a very good long-term bet at the time,” she said. “I didn't like you very much, either. I didn't want to have a baby by you. I didn't want to think about some awful visiting-rights relationship that stretched way on into the future. And I didn't want to be a single mother. It wasn't a very hard decision to make. There wasn't any point in consulting you about it.”

These were all fair points. In fact, if I'd got pregnant by me at the time, I would have had an abortion for exactly the same reasons. I couldn't think of anything to say.

Later on the same evening, after I'd rethought the whole pregnancy thing using the new information I had at my disposal, I asked her why she had stuck with it.

She thought for a long time.

“Because I'd never stuck at anything before, and I'd made a promise to myself when we started seeing each other that I'd make it through at least one bad patch, just to see what happened. So I did. And you were so pathetically sorry about that idiotic Rosie woman…”—Rosie, the four-bonk, simultaneous orgasm, pain-in-the-arse girl, the girl I was seeing when Laura was pregnant—”…that you were very nice to me for quite a long time, and that was just what I needed. We go quite deep, Rob, if only because we've been together a reasonable length of time. And I didn't want to knock it all over and start again unless I really had to. So.”

And why had I stuck with it? Not for reasons as noble and as adult as that. (Is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that's falling apart in the hope that you can put it right? I've never done that in my life.) I stuck with it because, suddenly, right at the end of the Rosie thing, I found myself really attracted to Laura again; it was like I needed Rosie to spice Laura up a bit. And I thought I'd blown it (I didn't know then that she was experimenting with stoicism). I could see her losing interest in me, so I worked like mad to get that interest back, and when I got it back, I lost interest in her all over again. That sort of thing happens to me a lot, I find. I don't know how to sort it out. And that more or less brings us up to date. When the whole sorry tale comes out in a great big lump like that, even the most shortsighted jerk, even the most self-deluding and self-pitying of jilted, wounded lovers can see that there is some cause and effect going on here, that abortions and Rosie and Ian and money all belong to,
deserve
each other.

 

Dick and Barry ask us if we want to go with them to the pub for a quick one, but it's hard to imagine us all sitting round a table laughing about the customer who confused Albert King with Albert Collins (“He didn't even flinch when he was looking at the record for scratches and he saw the Stax label,” Barry told us, shaking his head at the previously unsuspected depths of human ignorance), and I politely decline. I presume that we're going back to the flat, so I walk toward the bus stop, but Laura tugs me on the arm and wheels around to look for a cab.

“I'll pay. It wouldn't be much fun on the twenty-nine, would it?”

Fair point. The conversation we need to have is best conducted without a conductor—and without dogs, kids, and fat people with huge Marks and Spencer bags.

We're pretty quiet in the cab. It's only a ten-minute ride from the Seven Sisters' Road to Crouch End, but the journey is so uncomfortable and intense and unhappy that I feel I'll remember it for the rest of my life. It's raining, and the fluorescent lights make patterns on our faces; the taxi driver asks us if we've had a good day, and we grunt, and he slams the partition shut behind him. Laura stares out of the window, and I sneak the odd look at her, trying to see if the last week has made any difference in her face. She's had her hair cut, same as usual, very short, sixties short, like Mia Farrow, except—and I'm not just being creepy—she's better suited to this sort of cut than Mia. It's because her hair is so dark, nearly black, that when it's short her eyes seem to take up most of her face. She's not wearing any makeup, and I reckon this is for my benefit. It's an easy way of showing me that she's careworn, distracted, too miserable for fripperies. There's a nice symmetry here: when I gave her that tape with the Solomon Burke song on it, all those years ago, she was wearing loads of makeup, much more than she was used to wearing, and much more than she had worn the previous week, and I knew, or hoped, that this was for my benefit, too. So you get loads at the beginning, to show that things are good, positive, exciting, and none at the end, to show that things are desperate. Neat, eh?

(But later, just as we're turning the corner into my road, and I'm beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Saturday-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed…what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab,
going out of her way,
to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you're with someone permanently, you don't get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn't, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.)

Laura pays the cabbie and I unlock the front door, put the timer light on, and usher her inside. She stops and goes through the post on the windowsill, just through force of habit, I guess, but of course she gets herself in difficulties immediately: as she's shuffling through the envelopes, she comes across Ian's TV license reminder, and she hesitates, just for a second, but long enough to remove any last remaining trace of doubt from my mind, and I feel sick.

“You can take it with you if you want,” I say, but I can't look at her, and she doesn't look at me. “Save me having to redirect it.” But she just puts it back in the pile, and then puts the pile back among the takeaway menus and minicab cards on the windowsill, and starts walking up the stairs.

When we get into the flat, it's weird seeing her there. But what's particularly odd is how she tries to avoid doing the things that she used to do—you can see her checking herself. She takes her coat off; she used to chuck it over one of the chairs, but she doesn't want to do that tonight. She stands there holding it for a little while, and I take it off her and chuck it over one of the chairs. She starts to go into the kitchen, either to put the kettle on or to pour herself a glass of wine, so I ask her, politely, whether she'd like a cup of tea, and she asks me, politely, whether there's anything stronger, and when I say that there's a half-empty bottle of wine in the fridge, she manages not to say that there was a whole one when she left, and she bought it. Anyway, it's not hers any more, or it's not the same bottle, or something. And when she sits down, she chooses the chair nearest the stereo—my chair—rather than the one nearest the TV—her chair.

“Have you done them yet?” She nods toward the shelves full of albums.

“What?” I know what, of course.

“The Great Reorganization.” I can hear the capital letters.

“Oh. Yes. The other night.” I don't want to tell her that I did it the evening after she'd gone, but she gives an irritating little, well-fancy-that smile anyway.

“What?” I say. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just, you know. Didn't take you long.”

“Don't you think there are more important things to talk about than my record collection?”

“Yes, I do, Rob. I've always thought that.”

I'm supposed to have the moral high ground here (she's the one who's been sleeping with the neighbors, after all), but I can't even get out of base camp.

“Where have you been staying for the last week?”

“I think you know that,” she says quietly.

“Had to work it out for myself, though, didn't I?”

I feel sick again, really sick. I don't know how it shows on my face, but suddenly Laura loses it a little: she looks tired, and sad, and she stares hard straight ahead to stop herself from crying.

“I'm sorry. I made some bad decisions. I haven't been very fair to you. That's why I came to the shop this evening, because I thought it was time to be brave.”

“Are you scared now?”

“Yes, of course I am. I feel terrible. This is really hard, you know.”

“Good.”

Silence. I don't know what to say. There are loads of things I want to ask, but they are all questions I don't really want answered: when did you start seeing Ian, and was it because of the, you know, the ceiling noise thing, and is it better (What? she'd ask; Everything, I'd say), and is this really definitely it, or just some sort of phase, and—this is how feeble I'm becoming—have you missed me at all even one bit, do you love me, do you love him, do you want to end up with him, do you want to have babies with him, and is it better,
is it better,
IS IT BETTER?

“Is it because of my job?”

Where did that one come from? Of course it's not because of my fucking job. Why did I ask that?

“Oh, Rob, of course it isn't.”

That's why I asked that. Because I felt sorry for myself, and I wanted some sort of cheap consolation: I wanted to hear “Of course it isn't” said with a tender dismissiveness, whereas if I'd asked her the Big Question, I might have got an embarrassed denial, or an embarrassed silence, or an embarrassed confession, and I didn't want any of them.

“Is that what you think? That I've left you because you're not grand enough for me? Give me some credit, please.” But again, she says it nicely, in a tone of voice I recognize from a long time ago.

“I don't know. It's one of the things I thought of.”

“What were the others?”

“Just the obvious stuff.”

“What's the obvious stuff?”

“I don't know.”

“So it's not
that
obvious, then.”

“No.”

Silence again.

“Is it working out with Ian?”

“Oh, come on, Rob. Don't be childish.”

“Why is that childish? You're living with the bloke. I just wanted to know how it was going.”

“I'm not living with him. I've just been staying with him for a few days until I work out what I'm doing. Look, this has nothing to do with anyone else. You know that, don't you?”

They always say that. They always, always say that it's nothing to do with anyone else. I'll bet you any money that if Celia Johnson had run off with Trevor Howard at the end of
Brief Encounter,
she would have told her husband that it was nothing to do with anyone else. It's the first law of romantic trauma. I make a rather repulsive and inappropriately comic snorting noise to express my disbelief, and Laura nearly laughs, but thinks better of it.